The Final Steps

As we approach the final few deadlines everyone is starting to get restless and working as hard as they can in order to be able to deliver a properly finished product for the presentations next week. So I have to do my part as well, therefore, here I am, blasting awesome music through my headphones, typing this update for all of our faithful followers.

As a little starter, have this awesome poster I've been working on:

Le awesome flyer

There've once again been a lot of changes and features added, for example we finally have our first fully finished level, more tweaking for better gameplay, and updated menu screens. However, those are just small things, the major things we've been working on are particle effects and online multiplayer.

Particles
Particle effects were the first thing we tackled, because particle effects are AWESOME, this was quite a pain in the ass in the beginning to get working correctly, we've had all kinds of strange things happening, particles being drawn on top of everything, extra particle emitters being added (not supposed to happen). Most problems were quite easily resolved as most of it had to do with calling the proper methods (and not calling certain other ones), however, we were left with one problem that took us quite a bit of effort to get working the way we wanted it to. The exact problem we were struggling with was that we added nice particle effects with every bullet we shot and collided with something, but the emitter kept on emitting and wouldn't stop on it's own. We tried a lot of different things, but in the end the solution was actually quite simple, just give the emitters a lifespan so they'll automatically be stopped after a certain amount of time has passed. Now we have particle effects in tons of places, whenever a bullet collides with something, and even our menu's have particle effects, because more particle effects is more better.

Awesome particles in menu

Fire with particles

Online multiplayer
The other thing we've been working on is online multiplayer, because who doesn't want to team up with (or beat up) his friends over the internet? This was quite hard to implement as well, probable even more so than the particle effects. The problems already started when we tried to just simply connect to each other and a connection just couldn't be established, after quite a bit of frustration it turned out that the problem was simply ports not being open. Of course we had some more problems after that, they were fixed quite easily with a little bit of effort since the problems just came into existence because enemies and bullets etc. weren't changed yet to account for the transition to online multiplayer. In local multiplayer all data is stored on the host, however, with online multiplayer data has to be stored on the server because otherwise you'd get desync issues where the players see different things on their screens. Some of those changes are actually being worked as I'm typing this blog-post.

Additionally
In this final week we'll mostly be working on finalizing the online gameplay functions, adding more awesome particle effects, tweaking the game to make the gameplay enjoyable, testing for bugs and working on some promotional materials.

Finally
It's time for me to get back to working on the promotional materials so we'll be able to blow the audience away. Thank you all for reading this blog-post and hopefully see next time.

Hey Everyone, we're back!

This week we finally had the chance again to meet up at the university. It took me quite some effort to get back to my regular sleep-schedule again and regulate time spent "not working on the project" to a minimum.

It was Christmas for us developers too, so we took a 1 week break to see our friends and family. Not to mention gathering up energy to blast into 2014! But not everything went according to plan. Some family members were struck seriously ill and a teammate left our team. So, I want to say goodbye to our old teammate Yannick who served us from the start of this project. We wish him the best and hopefully he will find a course he will enjoy.

New features

Even during the holidays, we still managed to get some work done which resulted in some new features and an extensive variety of bugs. We have added some new features, including a couple of new bosses, more playable characters, and something we really had to add, sounds! So, without further ado, we introduce you our new bosses "Dr Wily" and "FireMan"!

Dr. Wily (phase 1)

FireMan

FireMan is not yet completely finished, but he is meant to be almost exactly like the boss in the original series, with a few AI tweaks to make it more challenging to defeat him. Dr. Wily's AI on the other hand is designed from scratch. Dr. Wily is a two stage boss battle that will really put the player skills to the test. His first phase consist of his newest creation hanging from the ceiling, bombarding the player with bombs and the flea enemies (as seen on the screen shot). His second phase is his emergency escape pod that really puts up a fight. He is a lot stronger than the other bosses and is a worthy final boss to defeat.

For the new playable characters, we added Axl and Zero, including MegaMen we now have 3 playable characters to choose from. They each get a unique ability and coop ability. MegaMen is able to slide (this was already shown in the midterm presentation) and will be able to buff allies to deal more damage. Zero has the ability to block incoming damage and can also grant his teammates a shield which functions similarly. And last but not least, we made it so that Axl could angle his shots and gave him the ability to heal his allies' health and weapon power, which is needed to use the weapons other than the standard blaster.

Tweaks

The last few weeks, we have worked on improving the camera movement, buffing the enemies, redesigned level selection, fixing bugs, and made some custom sprites. These changes will definitely alter the way this game is played, because the enemies actually deal much more damage than before. The camera movement is, due to bugs, still not in its desired state even after improving it. We still have lots more work to complete, but now with less people.

All weapons currently available to the player

We worked on improving and adding more weapons for the player to be able to unlock and use, additionally the player needs to be able to dodge the new attacks that will be used by the enemies (mostly bosses).
We revised the player loading and player saving methods to work properly, and we fixed some bugs that occurred afterwards.

What are we gonna do next?

In our last team meeting we redesigned our "to do" list because of our teammate dropping out. During this meeting we made some decisions. Like the decision we made regarding the changes we wanted to make to our level selection system, and changes we wanted to make to the background sprites and character sprites, for a more enhanced gameplay feeling.

This week we will focus on finishing the most important things we definitely need to have to have a game that will be fun to play repeatedly and still be challenging. Finishing the game levels and making the game playable with a functionally good camera are key objectives that we need to achieve this week. We also need to improve the game functionality as well as getting the return to game/restart game functions to work properly with the reset function.