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.