Wrap Up Of Last Two Projects

Cry Baby:

Cry baby was in my view successful. Out art was somewhat incongruous but come presentation time we learned that for the purpose of a prototype this is what makes the most sense to do. At this stage, unless pinning down a design look is critical, it doesn't make sense to put a ton of effort and time into the game when most likely everything from the prototype will be redone if the project is actually made.

Aqua Ducks:

Still somewhat it progress with the museum opting to run both teams games. I ended up doing most all of the networking code and the mainscreen interactions while Jorge took the majority of the work on the clients. This was a fun project to work in especially having a fair amount of experience in as3. The network code allowed me to stretch myself out as a programmer but not so much that I didn't enjoy myself. The largest hurdle that still remains is that on the main screen we are getting too much slow down and the program appears to "chug". It's also significantly worse on the screen at the museum so that came as somewhat of a surprise. 

Sprites Oh my!

I have found a program online that will take a collection of images and pack them all onto a single sprite sheet and spit out a corresponding text file with position and names. This is significant because now i can parse the text file for source rectangle information and only ever have to load a few textures for the entire game without getting bogged down in the math of extracting specific sprites. It's a really elegant solution and I can see myself using it again on a much bigger project and having it save loads of time on loading screens.

on top of this i've written up a realy basic input text box for xna. This is more or less accomplished by making a conversion for every possible key to an ascii character.

Cry Baby

Shark hunter is over... and hopefully we've seen the last of PowerGame Factory. On to bigger and better things.

After several hours and multiple sessions of brainstorming we have decided to do a trajectories based game. The simple explanation is that the player will calculate a starting velocity and angle to hit various marks in the playing field.

I started of a project and tried to put at least basic versions of many things we will need during development.

InputManager: Streamlines the controls so they can be easily changed later.

Camera: instead of having to scroll the world around I found and implented a camera that uses a matrix to change the way the 2d images draw. this allows us to easily track a single target as well as zoom and rotate the image.

Feedback from the professors seemed very positive. The art style especially (thanks Ashley) seemed to receive no criticism. It was a a lot of work combining projects again but now that we have it all consolidated it is going very smooth (well, smooth for pgf). The shark can smoothly jump and the waves move up and down with it. Also the over the top goryness of the pirate fighting is fun.

Shark Update

Work in powergame factory is slow. Lot's of progress was lost when we tried to combine work that was done on two separate computers. We were fortunate though that Eric and I have been sharing a computer and pair programming still.

I spend a considerable amount of time getting parallax backgrounds to work. A few hours into the task I was worried it was going to not be worth the time, but a few image resizes and tweaks later we had very awesome looking effect.

In the Beginning there was PowerGame Factory.

Last Monday we were split up into groups, mine being: Charlie, Ashley, Eric and myself. All of them have been very capable and easy to work with. The topic that our game is trying to bring awareness too is shark finning. Charlie has for a long time wanted to shed some light on this topic to the general public which for the most part seems unaware.

All said and done we have a story about a Shark who through some mutation is given legs, and thus the ability to take the fight to the humans. The gameplay would consist of two major modes, one being that of land combat using weapons and melee attacks, the other being in water would be entirely avoidance and twitch reflex control to keep your shark alive.


For my part I was assigned general testing with powergame for the first few days just to see what our capabilities are. It was obvious early on that the best route for us would be to play to the strengths of powergame and make a sidescrolling platformer with some action elements. I then set to work on making it possible for the shark to transition from land to water and water to land. It was simple to let the shark jump into water (and by water we had to make the shark able to fly in a certain area) but the opposite transition was more difficult. Ultimately Eric was able to help me solve this problem by using a variable that flips and giving the the player a boost upward when he leaves the water.

This past Monday Eric and I pair programmed (Powergamed?) and worked on creating a weapon that would be a net that is thrown by the pirates that would stun the player. Several hours into this problem it looked as though this would be impossible and we rethought the net mechanic and they are now stationary in the water.