Meeting
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On Monday, two weeks ago, the week before the Gotland Game Conference, we started the day by having a meeting about the design of the game, the UI design, and the graphics. The talk about graphics was about scaling down the scope and prioritizing, and I didn’t partake in that discussion as I’m not one of the graphical artists. The game design didn’t feel good enough and fun enough, and the UI didn’t feel intuitive and easy to use. A few of the changes we talked about for the game had already been in the works since before the meeting, but there were also some very important design decisions made then, and we had already at the end of the game made some changes that made the game much more enjoyable to play than at the start of that day. We at first had so the player could choose any action until the player is out of action points, which had to be confirmed each time an action was chosen, we changed that so the player each turn instead could choose between doing a move, an attack, move + attack, or move + move. We had since before been thinking about how to improve that system before we did that change, as how we had it then was cumbersome to use and wasn’t intuitive how it was used. This change was implemented in the game relatively quickly as it was similar to how we had it at a point previously. We also decided to add score, which players gain either by killing enemies, or by fulfilling their personal objective. I implemented this, while Adrian made the new system of choosing actions. The score acts as a way to incentivize and give feedback to the players, and so they can continuously be aware of how they are progressing. The score system at first only gave score for killing, but I during the following days added so it also gave score for progress towards the player’s objective, instead of simply showing at the end of the game whether the objective was completed or not. The Sadist and Masochist objectives was also implemented then, which replaced the “defeat all the enemies and reach the end” objective, and which from the beginning was an objective we intended to probably not keep. The Sadist gains score for dealing damage to either other players or enemies and loses score for killing, while the Masochist gains score for taking damage, from either other players or enemies. What I else did this week, except for very small fixes, was to fix so the animations works, at that time at least. I implemented animation when getting hit. I began making the code for destructible items, which was fully implemented in time for Gotland Game Conference, but wasn’t properly play-tested, and was as such not included in the game. I fixed a bug that made the input not work when zooming out on the client. I offset the rooms relative to on another, the code for that had been previously implemented, but the room switch didn’t work now so that was fixed. I began making so that network messages are saved if the receiving end isn’t ready for it, which I finished making the following week. This turned out to be something which might not have been needed at that point as the bug I was trying to fix turned out to be caused by another thing, but it was something that could possibly be useful in the future.  |