{"id":792,"date":"2011-02-19T06:43:05","date_gmt":"2011-02-19T06:43:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.cjohnson.id.au\/?p=199"},"modified":"2011-02-19T06:43:05","modified_gmt":"2011-02-19T06:43:05","slug":"rotablock-milestone-1-progress","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/game-dev\/rotablock-milestone-1-progress\/","title":{"rendered":"Rotablock Milestone 1 Progress"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over the last 12 days I&#8217;ve been working on Rotablock. It is much more exciting working on a game instead of just working on utility code. However it is also more time consuming as I find that design takes  more time than you intially expect, even for a simple game like this one. I also found a few bugs in the code that I&#8217;ve been working on over the last few months. A few things cropped up this week that took away a bit of my time. One of which being <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.cjohnson.id.au\/game-development\/get-onto-the-indie-games-room-bandwagon\/\">asked to help out with the Indie Games Room<\/a>, the other I&#8217;ll talk about later next week.<\/p>\n<h2>Milestone Progress<\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<h4>Stage Transitions &#8211; <font color=\"green\">Completed!<\/font><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h4>Mock Up Game State Graphics &#8211; <font color=\"orange\">Partially Completed!<\/font><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h4>Port Basic Mechanics to new Framework &#8211; <font color=\"green\">Completed!<\/font><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h4>Create Sound Effects &#8211; <font color=\"green\">Completed!<\/font><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h4>Realise the gameplay mechanics &#8211; <font color=\"green\">Completed!<\/font><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h4>Think up of a more appropriate name &#8211; <font color=\"red\">Not Completed!<\/font><\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Additional Items Completed<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\n<h4>Graphics Code for handling HSL Color<\/li>\n<li>\n<h4>Setup high score class<\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<li>\n<h4>Particle Effects<\/h4>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first thing that I worked on was porting the basic mechanics across. I did this first because I usually like to have several days to let them sit in my head while I figure if they are appropriate, how they need to be tweaked and how the levels\/stages can show off the mechanics and dynamics. The only mechanic I changed from the initial prototype was to make gems slide across only one position when the player slides them. Beforehand they continued to slide until they fell or reached a wall. I did this because I wanted the slide mechanic to allow for more precise handling of gems as the rotation mechanic doesn&#8217;t give you such precision. Earlier in the week I <a href=\"http:\/\/blog.cjohnson.id.au\/game-dev-progress\/realising-rotablock\/\">wrote up some details<\/a> about the fleshed out design.<\/p>\n<p>I then moved onto doing the graphics. There were several problems here as I was unsure of how to approach the backgrounds used in the game as a result I don&#8217;t have any mockups to show. I did however do the graphics for the gems and the grid that the gems lie in. I wanted the backgrounds to not be distracting like some games, eg <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=HJTE2cUy7kc\">Lumines 2(2:14 onwards)<\/a> yet to still be like a visualisation. In the end I couldn&#8217;t come to a conclusion about what to put in the background. One thing I did want was for the background to fade from one bright color into another. I ended up writing some code for handling RGB to HSL conversions as this made the process much easier. Around this time I also experimented with creating new particle effects once gems where removed. The final result is fantastic, it really fits in well with the look and feel of the game.<\/p>\n<p>In the last few days I created a high score board that is just saved out to XML. I also created a basic title and option screen.  <a href=\"http:\/\/www.drpetter.se\/project_sfxr.html\">sfxr<\/a> also was a massive help as always when it came to creating sound effects. I&#8217;m pretty confident that I&#8217;ll use the existing sound effects with maybe only minimal changes. State transitions was my final task. I saved this for last as I wasn&#8217;t sure on the best way to implement it. In the end I feel pretty happy about how it came together. Yesterday I had a bit of time to play around with the build on my Mac. I managed to get everything in the build working correctly except I still need to add in code that will copy all the dynamic libraries into the app bundle and change the library reference paths.<\/p>\n<p>I couldn&#8217;t think of a new name for the project. Hopefully over the next milestone I can think of something.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/02\/screen.png\" alt=\"\" title=\"screen\" width=\"635\" height=\"475\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-201\" \/><\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ll post up details soon of the next milestone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<a href=\"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/game-dev\/rotablock-milestone-1-progress\/\" rel=\"bookmark\" title=\"Permalink to Rotablock Milestone 1 Progress\"><p>Over the last 12 days I&#8217;ve been working on Rotablock. It is much more exciting working on a game instead of just working on utility code. However it is also more time consuming as I find that design takes more time than you intially expect, even for a simple game like this one. I also [&hellip;]<\/p>\n<\/a>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=792"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/792\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=792"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=792"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cjohnson.id.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=792"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}