📜 Where we left off…
Last week we left off completing the following goals- and creating a pretty buggy demo. This week is all about fixing those last bugs and creating a demo.
Week 2 Goals
- Get basic rhythm game done (Start->Select Song->Play->Score->Repeat or End)
- Thought I would have more time but at least we have… something!
- Start reaching out to third-party developers
- Oof. Did not do this.
- Create an overall outline and rough design docs for the overarching final game (story, gameplay loop)
- Okay! We have basically this— but more could be done too
So let’s look at the goals for this week in more detail
Week 3 Goals
- Get a playable demo out and start testing!
- Actually start reaching out
- Create a community for testers to give feedback and receive updated builds
Cool! With that in mind let’s see what actually happened
🔍 Finding the Beat
Last week we had a build with a pretty crazy bug that made the ghosts freak out and come at the player unexpectedly fast. Luckily after a not insignificant amount of time, my Deep CS Knowledge™ came in handy.
Can you find out what’s wrong? All the info you need is in that code block. Once you’re done, click the dropdown below on what’s wrong and the “fixed” code.
Solution to the 👻 Problem
So!
Remember shallow vs deep copies? Or in other words, reference copy vs value copy? Well turns out that’s what was happening, and instead of a nice linear interpolation, it became exponential. This is because
initialPosition was just a direct reference to the ghost’s position! And so instead of the intended behaviour (going smoothly from A to B), we got the exponential (or logarhythmic) behavior of going really fast to really close to the point, and then very slowly (imperceptibly slow) to the end. TODO- Something about exp/vs lin or deep vs shallow copy
🧙♂️ More work…
Next once it was fixed I started adding and improving the systems. Here’s what we started with from last week, and a comparison of some of the initial progress this week
← Last Week ☝️ This Week
So as you can see the biggest features are better visual indicators and a scoring system! However… the text popups aren’t the best indicator of progress, so that would be my next steps. Something else to note aside from the bug fixes is that I went through some iterating on the architecture- rather than changing color we now can change Prefabs for example. Just some improvements as I add support for important detailing/feel development which should be done in just a few weeks. A good system now means hours saved later!
Well, another dev session goes by and we are so close to a playable demo. We’ve added new lighting, a skybox, more theming, clearer texts, and a prototype score display! This should be enough for a “feel” prototype and in fact, I’ve gotten some feedback from Danny Rankin on an earlier version of the above video (pre-graphics stuff). Most of the feedback was just on improving the feel and connecting more with the physical interaction- we’ve had a bit of brainstorming and you’ll see that I’ve tweaked the camera angles and a few other things- starting to work on “feel” more than just “can I hit ghost”
The biggest things missing from a released demo to my friends and other interested parties… is just really the music, ironically. I built the music system in another project last semester, so its finally time to bring that in. I was planning to have that done this week but ran into some roadblocks, mostly as I had some time dedicated to this capstone sapped away by a day spent applying for Apple. So its a bit of catchup here to get the demo in more hands but at least I’ve had some feedback to work off of anyways.
Recap-
Week 3 Goals
- Get a playable demo out and start testing!
- So close to achieving this… aghhhh.
- Actually start reaching out
- It’s pretty hard to find someone that has the time to give good feedback and mentorship- that would be valuable in terms of having the technical skill and also not being from CU. Regardless, I didn’t spend as much time as I should have this week on this goal, in favor of just forging ahead myself.
- Create a community for testers to give feedback and receive updated builds
- Reached out to a few friends and got confirmations of interests, but have yet to setup a server and send out invites— mostly because I want to have a demo and feedback form in place before I do.
Honestly I made some good progress from last week, even if on the surface its not too apparent from the videos (again a lot of the systems were expanded behind the scenes, to make stuff like animations or FX much easier to implement- before it was just hacked together to quickly tell me if something worked or not).
However I did miss a bit of the coursework assignments, and am definitely behind on finding a mentor at this point that isn’t named Danny Rankin. By next week I’ll be looking to have a playable music demo with tracks and begin replacing default assets. I’ll also look forward to changing the animation (from the up/down “punching”) to one that more closely resembles Abby’s progress and control (and maybe we can start integrating that too?)
-m