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.