Slightly Coded – Potbellied King – Dev. Post 8

Appearently blogging is something I need to get better at. So.. I’ve gone for what? A month without reporting on the progress (at least). Well, I’ll just summarize everything here.

Last time around the game had passed the Alpha testing and was developing along the usual lines, we added a proper character model for the King as the old one was basically two giant spheres and a cylinder cosplaying as a king. At first we wanted to bind the King to the kinect but the model wasn’t built for this so the idea was eventually abandoned due to difficulties and we instead tried to simply play animations that was suited for the actions that the player was doing.

That reminds me, we actually got a new member for our group: Robin Holmgren joined about  two weeks before the Beta and helped out with the coding (by which I mean that he did quite a lot of work, at this heäs probably done as much work as I have which is saying quite a bit since I’ve been in on the project from the very start) since he didn’t get along with his first group.

With Robin in our group we managed to up to workspeed considerably seeing as we were two coders instead of just one. We crunched pretty hard on the night before the Beta, adding several features such as proper animation, a start screen, working high-score and an update to the level design. However, when we were going to show this off on the Beta test itself we were stunned to find that the game didn’t work as intended… there was no collision or collectibles. Nedless to say we failed pretty hard. After the beta presentation we looked up the problem and it was fixed in the intense timespan of five to ten minutes. Had we been the second group to show up we would’ve been fine. We spent the entire day trying to find the teachers and have them give us a second chance.

The next day we had another beta test but this time the people testing weere other studnets and a few teachesr. We got some positive and useful feedback. I also got to play some great games from the 2nd graders, one of which was a tower-defence + bejeweled mash-up that was a little confusing yet a lot of fun even if the difficulty ramped up pretty fast, another game was Mechapolis (I think that’s the name) which was about solving puzzles by using different models of robots – I managed to break this game pretty hard (I felt a little bad about it because I did really like the game) but the third game, a bear simulator (no, seriously) got even more broken, during  my few minutes of play I managed to climb a waterfall to eat flying fish, explore the non-existant mountain and fall to infinity (the whole game-breaking package) still, I loved the concept and hope that they can fix some of the glitches in the final version.

After the general beta test we had another shot at the official one, and this time around we were properly perpared with several working versions of the game and far better margin of time. We passed and moved on which was extremely satisfying and brought the team spirit up after some time of sheer depression due to the last test. We celebrated with ice cream.

…which kinda leads me to right now. Tomorrow’s the day that GGC starts, since we passed the beta we are showing of our game on the floor. I am really  really really REALLY nervous as to what is coming up but I know we can put on a good show and that everything will be fine.

Whew, now that the recap is finished I’ll just have to go to sleep. I wish I could give more details about what was done the past few weeks but I have a hard time remembering the details, I need to get better at blogging and not just ignore doing it. I should probably go to sleep now so that I’ve got enough energy to do my best tomorrow. I’ll probably blog about the days at the conference.

Wish me luck – Martin~