studio-gameOn

Attendance today was voluntary, but there is much to do and time is short.

As far as I am aware, programmers Alex and Christina worked from home: Alex busy preparing the audio, and Christina … I am not sure, but she may have been working on the menu system.

As for me, it was updating the game player states to meet the requirements as outlined in the still evolving movement design document.  Today, it was out with the player rolling, and in with the player sliding, ducking and crawling (again, fortunately Abbey was on hand to whip up some quality animations to match).  I also updated the first level’s boundaries to match the design specs. Producer Rory is doing a good job of updating the design doc as we go, in particular reducing ambiguity, but I am continually running into situations where there are no clear guidelines, such as:

“If the stuntman slides to an edge, does he fall, stop, or does he have a chance to catch himself based on the player’s skills?”

“If he slides into stairs, does he crash, simply stop or automatically start walking up the stairs?”

“Should the player really be able to push bails of hay through the entire level?”

As these sorts of decisions are not mine, I am constantly asking designers what they want the player to do under these circumstances … fortunately one designer, Pixel, had also volunteered to come in.

That leaves us with quite a bit to do on Tuesday before the board check things out.  Bugs remain in the collision system, there are minor issues with the crawl state to fix, the objects Josh was working on need placing in the map … and a whole slew of new states, linked to the activation zones (which I am not even sure are ready for Tuesday) need to be incorporated.  Rory updated the document today to incorporate these new states, which will speed up the process by eliminating unnecessary coding.

Having tested everything on this first level (playing through dozens of times), I am itching to finish this first one.  A new background environment to run through would be nice (I had a glance at some of the new level backgrounds … quite refreshing).  Even though it feels we are behind in the programming, the good news is that once these last features are in, they will be reusable, meaning that the remaining levels will be developed much faster.  Not only that, but we have been training one designer, Ian, to make levels as well, which should expedite the process.

Three weeks down, and only three to go!

Colin

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 24th, 2009 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Development Blog, Programming Team. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.