Though we didn't have a working recent build at the dry run, afterwards Tim and Patrick found and fixed a null pointer bug and now the current build works fine on the demo computers!
Last week we accomplished:
We are officially in feature freeze now. The remaining tasks before the demo are:
Tuesday 2018-06-05
We all seem happy with the gameplay and graphics, which is great. A lot of us are pretty tired and will be busy this week leading up to the demo.
Everyting coming together. (this video has sound)
Top-down view
Lose state - core tile is destroyed, new round starts automatically in 5 seconds
Win state - all enemies killed (and a time threshold is passed), press a debug key to start a new round
My goals for last week were getting the UI working and to make the turret model and camera behave properly.
I set up the UI to render, and Patrick set up to networking support for enabling, disabling, and updating UI. I was able to make the turret model behave properly and lock the camera to the head of the turret, but the player model spins around when the turret moves.
The main reason I didn't get the the turret completely fixed was that I started on it late due to being busy with preparation for events this weekend.
I need to finish fixing the turret, and then I'll help test and tune the gameplay.
I figured out a somewhat hacky way of implementing UI (render textured planes in pseudo-3D space).
I'm happy with how our project has turned out so far! I'm looking forward to getting the final tuning done and demoing on Friday!
This week, my goal was to finish the tile platings. Each tile is to have 4 platings on 5 sides (none on the underside). I also needed to rework the damage system from last week.
I finish both goals. The damage system is now more of a “hit point” system where tiles have a certain amount of life points and different items do deal different numbers of damage. The tile platings reflect that damage where full health tiles have all their platings and the less platings the tile has the more damaged it is until it falls off.
The tile platings introduced a lag, which makes the game almost unplayable. I asked the team for help but we have not been able to fix it yet. Some quick solutions will be to remove the number of platings, but we are hoping to find another way. (Patrick note: running in Release mode alleviates all the lag)
I already started adding in new sounds. I will be finishing that this coming week. (Patrick note: sounds should all be working now)
I continue to learn more about graphics and how to work with transformations. I feel much more familiar with the gameplay code base now.
Feeling good! The game looks much better with all the new textures and models.
I'm really bad at time management
N/A
Play and test the game a bunch with the group, discuss balance changes, and tweak the numbers a bunch.
There's a lot I don't know about C++ and the many ways things can go wrong.
I'm feeling pretty good about our game for the demo. The game is stable, and the gameplay is all there (if unbalanced). The game visually transformed a lot this week, just like Geoff said. Seeing the colored plating on the tiles, all the textures, the player animation, hearing the sounds, it's like seeing a butterfly come out of its coccoon, to make a cheesy analogy.
See if we can get animations in, ensure things are looking good.
Got all the textures and models done, Animations are also now in.
Nothing unexpected happened, I reached my goals
Get everything wrapped up, have an awesome demo!
Baking some textures requires some positioning, but I kind of already knew this.
Great, I'm excited at how our game is progressing!
Getting animations in the game.
Animations are in, minus accounting for root motion, but we don't really need that. Also, found a workaround for our Release mode bug. There is probably some memory corruption happening somewhere still, but as long as it runs...
Well, it cost me some sleep and my health, but animations are in.
Polish on the gameplay. No more big features.
Working on animations again reinforced my knowledge of skinned animation, so that was pretty cool. Also third party support of fbx models/animations loading is sketchy (at least with Assimp). I decided to use collada .dae files instead.
I'm glad I got animations working, I think it adds a lot visually. Sure there is no animation blending between states, but at least players aren't floating around in a T-pose. I think we are in a pretty good state.