Friday, May 9, 2008
Updates
* Updated the design document to version 2.1
* Got movement in the game
* Made a splash screen
The project is moving on. Have a nice weekend!
Thursday, May 8, 2008
Menu
The menu is getting some shape, maybe a bit small at the moment but well sort that out later on. Its working quite well too, we just need to manage the game time so that we see whats going on, everything goes too fast right now.
Our first test to draw text on the screen was quite early but didn’t get much attention since it was not a major development milestone.
/* Michael
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Back again
So last week the most action happened on the programming side of this project. I (Isak) took some time off and worked on some other stuffs since the programming part is the one that needed to catch up with the design. But this week we’re pretty synced and on Friday we’re planning on having a playable level.
The manual, boxart and the trailer is getting started on this week and should get a good groundwork going. I sure hope we could start playtest as well this weekend, since it’s not that much time left on this project. We’ll have to see what comes Friday and how the game looks.
//Isak
p.s. We did a project logo last week which is viewable at the sidebar (in a bigger version) as well as here:
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Level parser
The level parser is almost complete, all thats left is to add the Items to be parsed. The troubles i stepped on first was to get the file-reading to work as i wanted, i also managed to write parsing of the text in wrong a wrong way, twice. At the end i decided to skip a bunch of extra functions since i noticed they didn’t do much help anyway.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Programming progress
A progress update for the weekend. While my first bash at DirectInput was a very weak one, i did hit it quite hard this weekend. What i had to do was to get the basic information from DirectInput and throw everything in a separate object. I still have some problems regarding some keyboard inputs, but they are not high on our priority list. Apparently the || (OR) operator cannot be used when retrieving numpad keys. I will probably going to look into that later.
In other news, the gamepad controls was probably the easier part to implement but im not confident that it will cooperate with other. Last thursday we also smacked a texture onto our vertices, and made it move about.
And now for something completely different… the splash screen works, but i am stuck on how to destroy it in a good way. All it does now is show a picture and waiting for input, when input is applied it drops from the render manager, so im still missing the destroying part… we are probably missing the game objects manager.
Over and out
/* Michael
Thursday, April 24, 2008
We’re making progress!
This week has contained a lot of changes in both design and programming areas. We have changed engine completely and the programmers have started from scratch with the code. We’re doing a lot of progress in no time since both programmers and the designer is getting more passionate with these changes.
The story and the name of the game has also seen some changes.
All in all this week has been the most effective week off the whole project. I think it’s the sun outside that makes us work harder.
//Isak
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Change of engine
After much problems with Torque we decided to switch to a custom built engine for our game. We are still going to use C# as our language but our engine is going to be built in DirectX. This makes things easier and harder for us.
The harder part is that we need to understand in detail how our engine is going to work and plan ahead what objects we need. There is also a very steep learning curve for the technology, but with the abundant information on the internet should ease some of our technology issues. Time, building an engine and game from scratch will take time, and time is of the essence. We have little time left for our project and we need to get things rolling very fast so that we can reach deadline.
The easier things with this approach is that we need less extra code, that Torque had. The engine was way to bloated for our purposes and we can focus more on the technology and how to use it. Another aspect is that we are probably going to learn A LOT from our experiences building a complete engine and game from scratch. We probably will have more control over things than we generally would need.
Both programmers in our group are now very motivated of producing a working game in a short possible time. And the best thing is invaluable, we will learn very much sitting very close to the actual mechanics of the game.
/* Michael
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Project Eight, the name of the game
So after some discussion we have come up with the name for our project, we just used our original name Project Eight. We changed the story somewhat in the design document so we thought it would be a perfect match with this name. Here’s the prologue that we added to the story:
Sometime during the end of the second world war. A group of sociological masterminds developed a plan to stabilize the world politics. They created several groups of contract killers through extensive training and mental abuse, placed at discreet locations all over the world these camps managed several hitmen. One of these groups where group Eight. One of their hitmen regained some of his psyche and managed to escape the clutches of his group.
After an extensive hunt and his newfound view on the world, Derek Chase became the sole survivor of the group and also the last project named Project Eight. Derek’s eyes now turned on the other groups, a self-set goal to dismantle and destroy the groups with knowledge they taught him. The weapon they have developed have now turned on their creators…Derek, group Eight’s legacy.
So the offical name is Project Eight.
Monday, April 21, 2008
What to do?
The project is on it’s fourth week. That’s halfway through the time we have to build this game and we aren’t near any sort of prototype. What we need is for the whole team to assemble at school so we could fix the problems at hand and start working as a team. As it is right now I (Isak) sits here at school alone on a Monday. Monday’s should be the day we plan the week ahead, now the whole project gets out of balance.
Well, this is why we have these kind of projects I think. To learn from these kinds of miscommunication and take the knowledge onto the next project.
Tomorrow is a new day and hopefully we get some work done.
//A concerned Isak
–EDIT–
Fooled around a bit in the Pivot Stickfigure Animator and came up with this.
I’d admit I’m no animator, but I think it was ok for a first try.
