Storyline

ACT I

Soren goes to school every day, he has just started his sophomore year in high school. On the first day of school during lunch he spots an unusually dressed woman. “Who is that? And why is she dressed like that?” he thought. The woman approaches him, “I’m Tess, I work for Princess Leandra, I need your help” she said. “Wahaha, Who is Princess Leandra? And why does she need me!?” Soren said jokingly. Tess continues to tell her story, “Commander Khaur is threatening to overthrow Princess Leandra and take over her kingdom, Xuscua. But to break through our defenses he needs a powerful sword,  the mighty sword of Xuscua, which is hidden deep withinthe dungeons of Xuscua. Without it he’s useless, but the sword contains a power which is greater than anyone’s ever seen. The crypt is protected by countless monsters, but we have reason to believe that commander Khaur is close to obtaining the sword. We think you are the chosen one to conquer the dungeon, obtain the sword and defeat Commander Khaur once and for all!”. “What!? Me!?” Soren exclaims, “You must be making a mistake, I don’t know the first thing about fighting.” “But Soren, we need your help! You are our last hope!” Tess cried out. Soren says “I’m sorry Tess, *chuckles* but there is nothing I can do for you.”

Tess returns to Princess Leandra whom had been waiting for Tess’ return. Unfortunately Tess had to deliver the bad news to Princess Leandra. Lucky for Princess Leandra Azalea picked up on everything. As soon as she heard she decided to do something about it. So Azalea flew to Soren’s school.

“Soren, psst, under your notebook” Azalea whispers from under Soren’s notebook, “Soren, I have heard the whole story from Tess. You have to go! You have to save Xuscua! I know you can do it, I will help! With me by your side, there’s no one that can hurt us! Please Soren! Help!” “Tess’ story was real? Do you really think I can do it?” Soren whispers back “To be quite honest with you, I am a little scared to go, who knows what would happen.” After a long time of Azalea begging and Soren coming up with more and more excuses, Soren finally accepts his fate. Soren will go deep into the crypts and retrieve  the mighty sword of Xuscua, and save the people of Xuscua...

Final Blogpost

Why hello there and welcome to our very last GJG blog!

With this last post we are headed into our final week of this semester, and with that into the presentations of our game.

Everyone is working very hard as we speak. We are finishing up the final things and are getting ready for the presentation. And I can personally say the game is looking really good. Almost all of the art is ready (just in timeJ).

Two weeks ago Martin came up with an excel sheet about our classes and bugs to get a grip on everything that had to be done and how time consuming it would be. This was very helpful as we saw that it was quite a list that had to be worked down. At the start the buglist contained around 40 bugs, and as we speak it contains 7 bugs and none of them gamebreaking. The controller is coming along nicely, the prints are done and wired up and ready to be played with. The way it works is that the player presses/touches the copper surface of the button and that sends a signal to the controller which translates the signal to designated keypress.

We now have 3 floors and special floor called the “void”. Of course this is a bug where the floor disappears and remains an empty nothingness. We are trying to fix it but it proves to be harder than anticipated. Almost all the minibosses are ready to rain death and decay down upon Soren, the art is done and we are getting in the final tweaks that will make them a little more balanced and fun to play against. Balancing the game proves harder than first anticipated, mostly cause we play with a keyboard and the game itself is supposes to be played with the controller which makes it that much harder to play with. So the enemies are a bit over powered, mostly because they move too fast towards the player and that makes kiting rather hard with the controller. The movement with the controller is also rather difficult because you can’t really get a good grip on the controller to press the buttons but since you don’t really need to press and just touch the button it is manageable.

And of course we had some more difficulties with Git, some people (Mees) seem to forget that they must check everything they are committing and that it doesn’t contain anything from the classes of someone else. Or that you must first pull and then push instead of vice versa. But after some fixing we got it up and running again.

The achievements and online high scores are done, you can now try to compete with the very best players of Trippindicular, all seven of them. And if you really want a fast run to try and get a good score you can also use certain cheat codes to make your life that much easier.

Some of the cheats that can be used are: kill, which (you guessed it) kills all the enemies in the current room. Speedup, which gives you the movement speed gained from the sugary substance but now permanent. Motherlode, which gives you a total of 99 bombs, 99 keys, 99 coins and 99 healthpotions. Of course this is only for the weak and who aren’t ready for some super challenging gameplay.

We also added our final enemy, the exploding enemy. The exploding enemy is a bomb which rolls towards the player and once it collides with the player it explodes, beware because it’s fast. The design for the last floor is also done and we now have some nice stones and mossy rocks, because trees don’t grow underground (duh). We now have puzzle rooms which involves moving boulders towards the right position in a way that you can cross the water. At first the boulder didn’t really work and flew outside of the screen once you collided with it.

We finally chose an appropriate song for our game, it’s called elevator music and we think suits our game perfectly, for the starter room we have a special selected song.

Now that we are getting finished up with this final blogpost and the project. Everyone here at Gentle Jellyfish Games would like you thank you for being with us on this trip(pindicular).

We hope to see you at the symposium coming Friday and of course vote for us.

Thank you again and we hope to see you soon, GJG out.

Blogpost Saturday (Friday) 9 January

Why hello there and welcome to another GJG blog!

I’d like to wish everyone the best of wishes for the coming year! Let’s make it a good one.

Everyone had a great vacation and Thomas even went to Portugal to enjoy Christmas with his family. Everyone still got his fingers attached to their hands and can still see right.

 Now that our vacation is over we are back on track on finishing up the game. The game is shaping up nicely with the cleanest of codes to ever be written.. that’s something we are going to focus on now, cleaning up our code so that it is readable for everyone and not just the person that wrote it. And what also helps with clean code is bug detection, and boy do we have some bugs. For example when the enemies collide with a wall or tree it is supposed to turn around and head in the opposite direction or a random direction based on how many turns it already made. But for some reason when it collides the sprite goes beyond the object and keeps turning around resulting in the enemies slowly dancing his way outside of the screen, weird. Another example of sloppy code what resulted in huge CPU usage was that someone (Mees) made a Console.Writeline statement inside the Update method without a condition, which resulted in, you guessed it, a LOT of strings contain “here” and “monsterroom”.

We would also like to mention how well git works when you don’t have much experience with it. It really is an awesome feature to have which screws over your code when someone else accidentally pushes something you are working on, or when you both work in the cs.proj file that the merge doesn’t work out and that you are to discard your own cs.proj edit and later add it again. Great stuff J.

We are progressing nicely and as the game enters its final stage I’d like to introduce some of the changes we made in the past couple of weeks. Enemies now wander around and based on a turn counter choose to wander sometimes facing a different direction, with this change it looks somewhat better as opposed to the mindless turning around. We now have different doors that unlock based on special conditions. For example we have the monster door that only opens up when the whole floor is cleared of enemies. Or treasure rooms that only open up if you have the key, keys are dropped by enemies or treasure chests. We now have some really cool sprites for the enemies, shopkeeper and the skunk! The animations are neat and fit really nicely in the game.

The coming weeks we are going to add the last parts of our game, finishing the last floor and adding the last enemies to the game, a couple of more items and the strong and scary final boss Khaur. Most of the time we are going to optimize the game, because on some of the less expensive laptops the game doesn’t run as smoothly as we would like and a game like this shouldn’t really be causing lag at this stage.

The coming weeks some of us also need to really pay attention to Mehdi, some of us didn’t pass the test for logica and need to step up their game for the coming weeks to pass the subject, to those I bid you good luck! The others of course congratulations on passing the test and not filling out all of the multiple choice questions.

And the group that plays Magic The Gathering continues to grow larger and larger, they finally had an even number of players, for reasons unknown that was especially important, then Mees decided he was also going to play the trading card game. I’m constantly getting pressured to also waste all of my money to buy the cards, unlike Diego who rather spends it on aesthetics than his actual deck. But upon seeing it getting played out it, looks really fun and the art work is something almost as good as Diego’s. The only problem I have is the cost of getting a decent deck.

Now that we are drawing to a close with this blogpost and heading into the final couple of weeks of this project I’d like to thank you all for reading and hope to see you next time around as we are going to give an update on all of the bugs that we have fixed. Until next time