Blogpost Friday 18 december

Why hello there and welcome to another GJG blog!

First off, I’d want to say that as I’m writing this we all finally have our well-deserved vacation.

Second, which is that we’re all glad that we are done with the first part of Logica voor Informatica.

Third, we want to congratulate Mees another time for passing his driver’s exam!

We are happy that we were able to demo our game at the presentation past Wednesday, all went well and we got to show everything we wanted to show. Our beautiful makey-makey case, 3D printed thanks to Bram, our improvised controller thanks to Martin who worked until way past bedtime to have something to demonstrate how makey-makey works. Those coins sure did their work at the presentation. Now that we’ve got to see the other presentation we’re encouraged to really give it our all and present a nice and entertaining game at the end of the semester.

The development of the game went really well the past two weeks, our random floor generator is finished, the items are coming along nicely, the AI is getting there (apart from the A* pathfinding in which we’ll be delving starting as of today), the only thing that is still rather absent is the artwork, but we are sure that Diego will eventually provide us with magnificent art styles and leave our jaws on the floor.

We were troubled by processing lag spikes for quite a long time in the past two weeks and we couldn’t figure out what was causing it. At first it looked like it was caused by the enemies, every time we went inside the attack range (if you do the enemy will call for a method that adjusts the velocity every update method) it spiked. But what harm could a couple of vector changes do? Turns out a lot! If it is called a lot of times for enemies we couldn’t even see ourselves. Turns out the past rooms were stored inside a GameObjectList but this list was never emptied and was kept being drawn underneath our current room. So as you went in and out of rooms it kept stacking and stacking until the game was unplayable. Luckily it was detected rather quickly and dealt with just as fast.

Sometimes merges on git don’t go as planned and crashed your entire project. We all worked inside the .proj file and the merge didn’t work out and the compile couldn’t be executed, which went that we didn’t have access to our content library. But by miracles unknown Diego managed to fix it.

As for our meeting on Friday. Some of us got our beer for free (again!). Mees even provided us with a whole plate filled with 72 different kind of snacks, what a generous lad. As it turned out, the night before, Martin was feeling really generous and gave out some steam codes to those who were still in the call, sadly I had left just before that. Of course we went to the KFC as of our now set ritual. After that we decided it was time to head home and call it a day.

In the past blog we hinted that we would show you the A* algorithm or at least explain it. We’re sorry to announce that you need to contain your excitement somewhat longer as we are currently really busy discovering the wonders of this algorithm ourselves. In the weeks to come we will uncover any secrets this algorithm has and present them to you.

The other classes and libraries are coming along well. We now have an additional menu state and beautiful sound effects.

The sound effects are recorded by Bram, who wanders around in is house searching for objects that will produce just the sound that we need for our game. The sound effects we already have are really solid and really enhance the way you experience the game.

We also introduced some new enemies to our arsenal. We now have burrowing enemies who will track you while they’re underground and will pop up if they are directly beneath you, and no the game hasn’t name changed again into whack a mole. The first mini-boss is now done and ready to rumble, it still can’t really do much, it stands still and shoots a bullet now and then but it will be devastating when we return next time around.

On that note I would like to thank you for reading and as we head into our vacation I wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy new year.

See you next year!