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.