Over the last few weeks things at University and in general have taken a chunk of my time. I’ve gotten a job at the University working as a workshop supervisor and the first wave of assignments has just passed. I’ve also been working on another game which I hope to talk briefly about soon. Actually I was intending to talk about it earlier but things happened.
Despite the few red lines below and the excuses you’ve just heard, I’m really happy with the progress I’ve made. Lots of effort tends to go into polishing things up and this has definitely been the case here.
Milestone Progress
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Title Screen and Options Menu – Completed!
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Gameplay Demo – Not Completed!
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Find some background music – Completed!
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In game tutorial – Partially Completed!
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Dynamic Gem Dropping behavior – Changed but Completed!
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Background Graphics – Removed
Additional Items Completed
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Looping Background Music across Game States
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Added Menu’s for Restarting Game, Pausing Game and Submitting High Score
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Different colored gems used in State Transitions
The first thing I knocked out was Title Screen and Option Menu. They now look great. I also merged the Key Configuration Menu down into the Option Menu. I found a few issues with the GUI code when I would translate a GUI item. I used this opportunity to tidy up some of the GUI code and fix the bug.
I played around with background graphics but everything that I came up with was more distracting on the eye so I decided against using one. I also decided to only have a tutorial for the game instead of gameplay demonstrations. I setup code to display this tutorial on the title screen after the user waited a while. I also wrote some code to neatly place screen tips. Unfortunately I didn’t get time to finish the tutorial.
Finding Music was great. I found two fantastic websites in which I’ll definately come back to, Incompetech and Audio Jungle. I used some of the 8 Bit Tunes from Incompetech which work rather well with the game and its existing sound effects.
Finally I decided to go for a hands off approach to scaling up the difficulty of the game. I found that trying to organise the grid of gems into potential groups was not worthwhile because the grid changes so frequently and the rotation moves have the potential to vastly change the grid. I was also skeptical of how noticeable such a result would be. Instead I opted for a different approach with the speed in which gems spawn and the number of gems being spawned slowly increasing with time. The difficulty adjustment will need a tad more tweaking but it is 90% of the way there. I’m finding that I’m highly engaged when the game picks up speed.
The final game is very close to completion. You’ll hear more about when it’ll be ready soon.
Yes! Me too! But for one it include types of acautl stones which makes it so much more information. I just wanted to see the stat that belonged to each of the names, then I can just work out for myself which stones are current for each tier. A lot less info to keep track of. Also, you need to be careful with wowwiki because their info is out of date a lot of the time. There’s an equivalent on Wowpedia that’s quite nice, they are much more frequent with their updates.