S2 Week 15 - Part 3, Victory

Portfolio night went great. We got there and started setting up around 3pm. We noticed we still had a few issues to work out, but luckily we actually fixed them in time for the 4:30pm industry people to come in. We had a nice corner spot with a big monitor set up for people to play on.

One of the most annoying bugs of the enemies derping out while attacking you has been fixed. They now follow the player incredibly well, and we even got out the majority of the lag from the game, so you could have hundreds of enemies on screen without noticing the slightest drop in frame rate.

A good amount of people actually stopped by and checked out the game, a few thought it was pretty fun. Overall a good result in my opinion. I'm just happy we got something playable out that was semi-fun to play.

Blog review/peer reviews are going to be even more fun this time around. I plan on making my opinion pretty clear on some members of the team (I know others will be doing the same as well). As bad as it sounds, there are a few people I strongly hope do not come along with us to next semester. We need to have our best foot forward and some people will be dead-weight in our teams current setup.

S2 Week 15 - Part 2, Sluggers

I have got to say, we knocked it out of the ballpark today. It was honestly one of the most fun days of the semester, and no it was not because we were slacking off. It was because we GOT. SHIT. DONE. We had about 80% of the class play testing the game and competing for high scores (which was a lot of the fun). People would test and play, and myself and a couple others would fix those issues/balancing errors and send the build back out. It was great.

We got a new map, oooh pretty picture!

We knocked out about 7 different versions of the build for people to test, so quite the productive day. It was just a cluster-f*** of everything falling into place perfectly (does that make sense? Oh well).

The new map is much better. It is much smaller than the previous one, and it's layout and shape lend to a better play style and experience.

This is all turning out super well for portfolio night on Thursday.

S2 Week 15 - Part 1, The End Times

This week be 2 parts, arr (maybe even 3!!!!). Lots of things to cover.

This week we have portfolio night, so it is really crunch time now. I got my high scores system completely working now. It is in the build, along with ANOTHER sword tweak (although not as big as before).

Lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of playtesting going on. We are all trying to make sure things are balanced properly. Although some people are kinda slacking off at times, some things are still getting done. The game is starting to look pretty good though in my opinion.

Funnily enough this picture is very applicable to me:

Rumors of a new map are floating around, and the armies of Mordor are amassing at the gates.

S2 Week 14 - Breakthrough

I made a breakthrough on the high scores! I now have it to where the player will be able to submit their high score if they win and get a new high score. There are some weird bugs with the loading from save at the moment, but those will be easily fixed (hopefully before next week).

Also fixed some things with the build, one of the major things being the sword got reworked a bit again. It now works better! Yay here's a sword picture:

Lots of bug fixing, and soon there will be new maps implemented.

S2 Week 13 - High Scores

The high score system is proving troublesome... Many silly things to account for when handling this, the script needs to be not destroyed when scenes change, it needs to be loaded up only once when the game starts, it needs to be refreshed whenever they enter the high scores page though, the list goes on.

It's looking pretty good though, I've gotten the general layout of everything setup at least so you can see where each score is going to go.

This should be approximately what it looks like (minus the Pac-Man ghost):

S2 Week 12 - More build things

This week I focused mostly on getting things in the build as well as making other things better, oh the perks of being build master...

We did start a new sprint, my feature is the high scores system. I've got to have it so that when the player wins, it will check if they got a high-score, and if they did, it will ask for their initials. The scores also need to be persistent even if you exit out of the game (so saving them to PlayerPrefs, most likely).

A quick list of things done (not complete or specific necessarily):

• Improved sword attack, animation, hitbox, etc
• AI does damage (lots of it too)
• AI moves better
• AI won't derp so much when attacking
• Toci walks better
• Oh hey Jaguars

Andddd another video!

No music this time too, woot.

S2 Week 11 - Burn Baby Burn

Yayy, this week I got the fire ring ability working. Does damage to everyone in it, has some nice animations courtesy of Geoffrey, and even plays a burning sound! :D

And once again, I have a lovely video! Don't mind the music, I forgot to turn it off again.. Not like it's bad music. I also figured out how to embed the video in the blog post.

As for the build, I put in William's directional animation system for the enemies, so those should look better.

S2 Week 10 - FIRRRRRRREEEEE

This sprint one of the main features I will be working on is the "fire power". Basically just an ability that will hurt enemies when they're in the circle the ability produces. It'll look (something) like this:

This week I added the temple GUI to the build. Still pretty basic and needs some working on to incorporate it with XP system and inventory.

S2 Week 9 Day 1 - End of Sprint 1

So today is "technically" the end of sprint 1. To be quite honest, we were in full on get-everything-done-so-our-burndown-looks-good mode. I had my features done last week, so today I was focusing on getting everybody's stuff they completed into the build.

I managed to get Nevin's inventory system in, along with a few others. Version number incremented to 0.1.0 :)

This post will just be pictures of the current build! Even better, a video! It shows the basic AI at work in a very basic whitebox.

https://youtu.be/-FOA_-Skicw

Excuse any music in the video, I may have forgotten to turn off what I was listening to while recording these...

S2 Week 8 Day 2

Well I'm still here! I shouldn't be surprised, I've honestly been working my butt off this semester. I was given a score of 4 by my group, which I am really appreciative for. On another note, I'm going to be making sure I actually write these soon after they happen, so rather than waiting until the end of the midterm/semester.

Most of the group got 4s for their scores. It's really not surprising, most of our group has been kicking ass and taking names this semester. No one got kicked from team, so we've got that going for us.

S2 Week 8 - Dun dun DUNNNNN

War drums sound, yells are heard, and orcs begin to.. Wait wrong topic. But really, this end of the sprint is going to be good. Right after it finishes, we have peer reviews. The flaws will be brought to light in front of everyone, and no one is safe from the judgement of the group.

In other news, I completed the AI scripts to work with the navmesh, YAY!!!!

The squads now work together using the navmesh to surround the player, will attack the player (technically don't have them doing damage yet but they act like they are), and will chase you properly (not in a derpy way) throughout the "level" I have set up. 

The first picture shows them chasing the player through the level using the navmesh (running around buildings, yay!). The second picture shows them encircling the player and attacking them. The ones that look out of place (not in formation) are the ones that are currently attacking.

We also have mana bars and health bars, and one ability currently "visible" in this build. We have other things in the build obviously but they just weren't incorporated into this portion. 

Wish me luck in this next day where we judge our peers, it's gonna be a doozy!

S2 Week 7 - Nearing The End

The days are ticking away as the end of Sprint 1 rapidly approaches. Definitely quicker than I would like as I am having troubles setting up the scripts to use the navmesh properly. They are very derpy and tend to fly all over the place, going everywhere other than where I want them to go. Oh well, I will have it done before the end of the sprint next week.

One of the things I haven't talked about much in this semester's blog is AGILE. That's about to change! We've been using Emil's new project called Psyberfire to facilitate our AGILE needs. It is an amazing program that lets you set up your milestones, features, tasks, basically anything you can think of that involves AGILE development, they've put it in this website.

Especially as a build master, having all of these features is amazing. You're able to see who is working on what, how fast people are completing tasks, and what has been completed so far. It's a really great feeling to see that purple bar fill up with finished acceptance criteria. As build master, I'm able to see when things are done so I can know to pester people about giving me those things to put in the build, and also tell them they suck and give it back to them. It's great.

S2 Week 6 - Sprint 1 Underway

We are now in Sprint 1 full-time! If I do say so myself, the AI is looking great. It encircles the player, the enemies in the front row will attack you, and they will chase after you in a derpy way if you try to run away. I'll have to work on making it a more fluid chase in the future, but now I'm working on getting the AI to use a navmesh (my main goal of Sprint 1). It's difficult, as the way I currently have the AI set up in Unity is using its built in 2D settings. This puts everything on the X-Y plane, with the Z-axis being the axis you are looking through (the "height" axis, which isn't used in 2D).

The reason this is difficult to set a navmesh up in is well, navmeshs can only be setup on the X-Z plane. So this means I will be spending the next bit of time setting up my AI test scene so that I will no longer be using the default 2D settings. I'll have to rotate everything in the scene to be on the X-Z plane, change every variable that uses an X-Y coordinate, and remove every 2D component and change them to 3D (colliders, rigidbodies, etc). Yeah. It's gonna be a pain in the ass, but it will be oh so worth it in the long run. Using a navmesh is going to let us navigate the squads/troops through the levels with ease.

Like you can see in the picture above, making the navmesh is easy. It's getting the troops to do the right thing at the right times that's difficult. It's coming along though, I've got the navmesh set up and I am just modifying my scripts to have the enemies actually use it. I'm adding NavMeshAgents to every squad member. I've been debating between putting it on the squad vs each squad member, but I think putting it on each member will make things look more fluid, and a little more chaotic (which is what we are going for, while still maintaining control of the enemies).

S2 Week 5 - Sprint 1 Prep/Begin

It's almost here. Sprint 1 is only a weekish away and I couldn't be more excited! The AI for movement of squads is nearly done, just a little more tweaking and it should be there. I can only imagine the amount of damage I'm going to do to the AI when it comes time to add more things to it.

The AI now fans out, multiple squads will work together to spread out around the player (forming a circle around the player), and the ability for them to attack the player is quickly approaching...

In build master news, our pipeline works. Obviously we will have some people who are going to have troubles following the rules (which I will put below), but overall it's going to work out well I think. Let's just hope I don't have to become an angry build master.

Rules for the build:

1. Follow naming conventions. (In Google drive, with everything laid out nicely)
2. Put things in the right place. If you don't know where to put it, ask.
3. Add the things you put up for the build to the version control doc.
4. Let me know when you put something up, and don't complain when you put something up and I don't see it if you didn't tell me it was there. I will check sometimes but not all the time.
5. Follow naming conventions. 

S2 Week 4 - SKYNET!!!

I've created Skynet.. I worked on the AI over the weekend and it's.. progressed. I can't control it anymore, it is developing itself. It told me the other day that my hair looked nice, and when I asked him what's wrong he said "It's not a tumah!!" I'm a little worried to say the least.

On a more serious note, the AI definitely is coming along quite nicely. I've now got the squads approaching the player, and once they reach a certain distance away they begin to fan out. See the image below.

S2 Week 3 - Secrets Brought Out

I've been secretly devving.. *cough*.. I mean white-boxing the enemy AI. I've claimed it as my own. It's my baby. None shall harm my baby. If anyone does I will not be happy with them. I think I've made my point on it. Anyways, I told Zach and William what I was working on so they knew.

Basically I'm setting up the AI as a squad system. There will be a squad prefab and it will be made of individual prefabs to represent each squad member. Right now I'm trying to set up the squad so that it will approach the player and maintain a good formation.

S2 Week 2 - Sprint 0

Well we've now entered Sprint 0 after our preparatory week before this. During this sprint we will be testing our pipelines for everything and setting up user stories, features, and tasks for the next two sprints.

Oh on another note, I was made build master, yippee!! (Let me just put this on real quick)

In this role I will be in charge of incorporating every feature that everyone makes into the build. Basically everything that goes wrong with the build is going to be blamed on me (yay), unless I have a sacrificial lamb to give up... I sacrifice thee to Huitzilopochtli! Praise be to the sun! Ehem, moving on.

I'm going to be setting up a pipeline test for all the programmers, basically putting up a build on google drive, and having everyone edit a document (or something) within the build to make sure people know how to use the layout of everything I set up in the google drive.

S2 Week 1 (Week 17) - A New Beginning

Well, back again to the wonderful world of CSG. After almost a month of break, I was more than ready to jump back into the fray.

Last semester our groups idea got kicked out of the running. Now, we are working on the project of West State Studios called "Fifth Sun". It honestly sounds like a pretty cool game, with Aztecs and half naked woman, how couldn't it be cool?

This week is all about getting to know our new teammates and getting ready for Sprint 0.