Ms X

Yesterday I started on the first real depiction of our main character, known only as Ms X, which is to go on the main menu. I started with a rough sketch which I have reworked into clean line art, aiming at the style of the Ms Marvel comic, with thin line art that is thicker on the edges. I chose the pose and facial expression since I wanted to capture the essence of the game in the main menu. She […]

Leakin’ dem bytes

Memory leaks are something that programmers (especially those in C and C++) always have to keep in mind. Unfortunately, we didn’t really think about them until roughly halfway into the project. That means we end up with something like this:

Taken from our pre-alpha playtesting build.

This could have ended up a lot worse than it actually did. We didn’t really have any constant leaks, so the total leaks didn’t grow in size.
Now, for those of you that aren’t that into programming, […]

Playground Panic #4 – Hierarchy, optimization and control

After some discussing with our SCRUM-master Simon Wulf, we agreed on having to change our code-structure. Due to reasons (mainly time-pressure and lack of experience), we handled sprites in our GameState together with the rest of the code. It’s pretty simple to do with SFML’s built in things, but for overall optimization and to avoid clusterfuckyness in the code, it’s much better to let the objects themselves handle these kinds of things and let the GameState stay in the unknown […]

The Sound of “sort of-” Music

Greetings! Better late then never I suppose.
I spent this week working on the music for the game. And wasn’t that an experience, for a moment I really thought I had gone over my head with it all.
To be honest I’ve never been especially musically talented nor have I ever made my own music. So as you could probably tell this was a challenge from the beginning, and even much more so as the genre we have gone for is Jazz. […]

Codename: Haunted Light – Generation Process

This week I’ve been mostly thinking and planning out how the level generation will work and I’ve also assisted our programmers in different parts of the game.
since I haven’t completed any new artifact in the game this week (except different resolution support…but it’s such a minor part and therefore I don’t’ count that) I’m going to talk about a feature of Haunted Light that’s a work in progress. The “(Re-)generating Levels”. I’ll explain what I mean by that.
Haunted Light is […]

All GUI and no animation makes William a dull boy (but nah, it’s cool)

This week has been quite different from the previous ones. Up until today, I have worked almost entirely on designing characters and animating them. However, our programmers are now busy working on putting the animations we already have to use, and we are not that likely to add many more, if any at all. This has resulted in this week becoming devoid of animation, and instead, I have been tasked with designing parts of the GUI.
The one item that I […]

Artifact 4 – State Machine

I am done with collision manager. It only needs to be updated as the game is progressing.
I haven’t really finished a new artifact yet, because it is a lot of job and we have helped each other in the group a lot this week with programming issues.
Today I will try to explain a finite state machine (FSM) for AI states that I am making.
I received various books from an acquaintance of mine. One of them is called “Programming AI […]

Artifact of the week: Implementing Morker

Hello there!
Last week we made a prototype of the morker that was able to shoot bullets towards the player and move to each side to make it harder to hit it.
So this week our task was to implement it in the main project that we have started to get together after some struggles with github.  Even though we already knew what we wanted the morker to do and how we could do it in the prototype, it was another thing […]

Sprint planning + progression (?)

As usual I am going to write about the past week and what I’ve done as a coder in the group. So last week I had a bunch of things to, and the following picture showes what the assigned tasks were that I was expected to do:

 
As you can see there were a total of eight artifacts and the estimated work hours summed up to a total of whopping 52 hours in a week, so it isn’t hard to […]

A week of polish.

This week has been spent doing all sorts of small, often un-noticeable things.

I created a key, which will act like an indicator- To show the player which keys has been collected. This is the only piece of actual HUD we’ll use, but we deem it necessary as we do not want to confuse the player; which key did he just pick up? Was it blue? Maybe green?
Below is the first Mockup I created with HUD in mind:

And here’s the […]

Artifact 4 – State Machine

I am done with collision manager. It only needs to be updated as the game is progressing.
I haven’t really finished a new artifact yet, because it is a lot of job and we have helped each other in the group a lot this week with programming issues.
Today I will try to explain a finite state machine (FSM) for AI states that I am making.
I received various books from an acquaintance of mine. One of them is called “Programming AI […]

Parent UI

So what’s been happening? Well for a while I have been struggling with the parent UI, I didn’t really know how get It working and a was a bit confused until I got help and now things looks to be done soon(read more about what the parent UI does in the two posts before this one). So now there have been changes so it is easier to choose what kid that is going to be cleaned before the parents come. […]