Midterm

Welcome everyone at what is probably the last update of our blog for this calendar year. The exams are over and all that is left for us is this blog post before we can celebrate our holidays as well. Since our last update a few weeks ago, we have again been doing well on our way to achieve our goal. In fact, we are already able to play parts of the game! In this update, we want to raise attention for the things that have kept us busy the past two weeks and already look forward to the things that still need to happen in order to run the game properly.

Also, since the last update of our blog we have received bad news from one of our team members. We started this project with five members, but after a while it became clear that we were getting an additional team member. About a week and a half ago, we received the news that we were back at the original five names which we started this project with. We want to thank Jop for his services and wish him the best.

Midterm presentation

So, what have we been doing the past two weeks? As a matter of fact, this week was the midterm of our project. This means that we were expected to show our tutor, the Teaching Assistant and fellow students what we have been doing so far in the project by means of a short presentation and getting our code checked. We also had to fill in a form containing our own experiences so far.

On Monday we had our code checked by the Teaching Assistant and got some feedback on it. Also, we had to sent in the form on this day. On Wednesday, in addition, there was a short presentation which had to be about what we had done so far and what we plan to do before we can call the game ‘’finished’’. In addition we had made a brief demo of the game play so far. For this game play demo we made three short introduction levels, consisting of a simple single map, the same map for co-op and a single square map with a boss-fight.

Metalman

But what is it exactly what we have been working on? This two-week period, there is a lot of work been devoted to the different types of enemies. Those are now almost entirely implemented in the game, except for the enemies we want to create ourselves. Furthermore, there has been a lot of working at the game states, which are now all working. And moreover, this week was worked on improving the classes for both the enemies and the players. There is now a general class containing methods and variables that are used by multiple enemies and players. This makes it easier to add new players and enemies in the future.

In the meantime, we also had some problems with Visual Studios. When some of us were trying to open the game’s solution, the program suddenly refused to open it. In one situation, this was easily solved by choosing another start-up project. On the other hand, the problem in the other situation is still not solved. Probably lies in the lack of a specific component in the program. Both the folder as a completely new installation of Visual Studios have not had the desired results so far, but we will keep trying!

For that reason we have not been able to complete the first level of our game completely. Most of the enemies have been implemented as well as the background after splitting it (it was too big). The design of the first level is already done and the place of all sort of different things, such as enemies, power-ups and tiles in this first level are discussed. The only thing we have to add here to complete the level is to translate the whole level into characters in the Notepad document. Furthermore, we also want to look at the different types of enemies in this level and distinguish them in strength. Now they all do the same amount of (little) damage, making it virtually impossible to die if do not play like a complete retard.

Background, tiles & HP/WE bars

For the holidays, we have not made any concrete plans. So far we know there are at least two members not able to work on the project the whole one and a half week due to vacation, holidays and learning for exams. But that’s cool. We can all use a little break, I guess. 

Moving On

Here we are again, with this time mainly a summary of what we have been doing the past few weeks, and what we all want to achieve the upcoming weeks. Furthermore, there will be items discussed such as our weekly meetings and visiting a workshop on particles.

But let's keep the set chronologically and talk about what we have been doing since our first and also last update. As you could have seen in the previous update, at the time we just finished the Analysis Document , which meant that we almost certainly know how the original game was put together at this time. We have achieved this goal mainly by playing the game itself or analyze game play videos on the internet. As a result, we could easily get an idea about how we want to edit the game and all the different parts in it. This brings us automatically to the Design Document , which actually came after the Analysis Document . This is mainly what kept us working the past two weeks. It contains a number of basic aspects of the game itself, but the big difference with the Analysis Document is that this really is about how we want our game to be in comparison with the original game. You could say it describes how we want to improve the game, but also has some basic aspects of the game in it, since we do not want to improve every single aspect. A few examples are how the player interacts with the different objects, the story-line and how the design of the different menus is going to be. But also how we want to achieve this through the code is an important part of the Design Document.

Design Titlescreen

One of the things that came up in the Design Document and we want to implement our new game are called particles. We got this idea as a result of the workshop that was given at Utrecht University. Three out of six persons of our team attended this exclusive workshop and have been able to find out about the particles and how they can be implemented in a game. These will in normal circumstances also be implemented in our game. At least, that is the plan.

In addition, we would also like to talk about the meetings that we have every week. Usually we try not to use only the mandatory hour on Thursday afternoon with our tutor to discuss our project, but we try to plan an additional meeting every now and then to make sure that everything runs smoothly. It is very important that everyone knows their responsibilities and is actually working on his part of the project . In this way we thus ensure that the group has constantly updates of how things are going and how the rest of the team stands in terms of progress. Although it is often not possible that we are all present at this meetings, it is nevertheless proved to be the most efficient way to communicate with each other in our team.

Design Options Menu

Now that we have talked about the things we have done in the past few weeks, it is time that the things we want to do next few weeks will be discussed. Now that we have the analytical phase behind us, it is roughly said time to start making the game itself. This sounds easier than it really is going to be of course since it is a lot of programming and mistakes are easy to make, but we will try our best. We even had our first troubles while programming. An error occurred in the player physics and it took over two and a half hour for us to figure out a simple ‘’2’’ had to be a ‘’3’’. But to achieve our goal everyone in the team has taken separate tasks or been allocated some of them and this person is also responsible for this part, of course. Our plan for the upcoming week and a half and the presentations after it are to make at least one playable level with all operating elements that apply to it and the player and try to finish the versus-mode. For this element we also want to have at least one playable level.

Design Music Menu

Briefly , we finished the Analysis Document and Design Document last week and we started programming the game itself. At the moment we are already working hard on achieving our goals, while the design part also is being worked hard on really hard.

The Beginning

This is our first "real" blog-post. In this post I'll give you some quick information on what we'll be doing for this project and some extra info on the side as well.

Let's start with some information about the team. Our name is as you might have already noticed Pownage Productions (logo made by our awesome team captain). We chose this name because we'll be powning the other teams and will definitely come out on top, or try very hard at least. More info about the team members can be found at: About Us

The goal of this project is to implement a retro game and extend some parts of it with state of the art technology. We'll be doing a remake of Megaman. 

  

Most of you should know what I'm talking about, but for those of you that don't I'll give you a quick explanation of what megaman is. 

Megaman is a side-scrolling platformer where you play a character named, you might have already guessed this , Megaman. Megaman is a robot, created by Dr. Light, who is constantly trying to save the earth from the evil Dr. Wily and his creations. 

     

To save the earth Megaman must first defeat eight bosses before he can go to the last part of the game to finally beat and stop Dr. Wily. Upon defeating each of these bosses Megaman gets access to new powers that can be used against Dr. Wily.

If you're interested in a more thorough analysis of analysis of Megaman, you can find our analysis document at this link

That's all for today, we'll be back soon with more info for all of you.

Pownage Productions

Alle dingen hebben een begin, zo dus ook Pownage Productions.

Dit is onze eerste update en zal zeker niet de laatste zijn. Gedurende het komende blok zal deze blog regelmatig worden geupdate met informatie over de stand van zaken en vooruitgang van ons introductieproject gametechnologie.

We hopen jullie vanzelf weer hier te zien,

Pownage Productions People