CSE125 SP21 Group1

Every one of us has been working really hard to get familiar with the tools we are going to use throughout our game development -- Blender, OpenGL, Winsock, etc.
At the beginning of this week, we decided as a group our task assignment, and made our initial development plan. After talking to the professor and the TA, we saw some parts of our plan were vague, so we planned to revise our plan during the next group meeting.
Also, we are learning the architecture of our game, that is, how different parts of the game are connected, and how they work as a whole. After understanding the overall architecture, we hope to break it down as much as we can, so that we are able to make a more detailed and comprehensive plan, and each one of us can have a clearer goal in the future weeks.

Every subteam has made some progress during the past week. Our artist Siqi has designed a 3-D map with blocks, and is working closely with the graphics team to start rendering our game objects. The graphics team has developed their graphic engine and successfully rendered the donut with shading normals, and is now working on object textures. The networking team decided to use the Boost library, and implemented an application where data can be transmitted between client and server and cached on the server side, and the server can distinguish different clients.
During the meeting, we talked about the overall gameplay, including design of weapons and abilities, and how players can interact with each other and blocks on the map. We also outlined our overall game architecture, and decided to implement two "loops" to take player keyboard input and update the map status.
For the next week, we will start integrating things by implementing interfaces for cross-team interactions and rendering more models with our graphics engine. We will further develop our gameplay code and work on detailed game logic.

We finally see our server up and running. Now we are able to handle input from different clients (players), and update game states accordingly by rendering game objects at updated xy-coordinates.
Even though now we are only rendering some basic models, we hope that more models (such as shotguns, bombs, and slimes) will be coming up in the next week.
Our subgroups are continuing our work on the game logic and trying to add new features to our game. During the meeting, we talked about how we would represent each game object with unique IDs, and potential interaction players can have with these game objects.
We are happy to see our progress so far, and confident that we will be making more progress as the skeleton is ready.

Progress of each subgroup:
Graphics (Mingjie, Xincheng): basic game board without animation; learn more animation.
Art (Siqi): board.h file
Server (Jamie): generate game board; communication with client

Major tasks we finished this week:
Initialization of our gameboard with a coordinate file.
Game logic on weapons and their interaction with cubes on the gameboard.
Game logic on checking bombs' AOE (area of effect) without delay.
Fix compilation problems on both local machines and the demo machine.

Major tasks we finished this week:
Linked the Assimp graphics library with our project.
Rendered more game objects with their textures.
Set up the communication of graphics information between server and client (to be tested).
Finished up more game logic on bomb, player, etc.

We have achieved the MVP (minimum viable product) of our game! Now our game objects can be initialized without hardcoding and rendered on the game board, and users are able to control the player models to move around and place bombs. We don't have the animation for bombing effect yet but the game logic looks good -- bombs can destroy blocks and kill players. We are working on discovering better models to make the game look nicer, and implementing more game logic, animation, sound effects, and a user interface, hoping to deliver what we really want next week.