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.