Another week draws to a belated end, and all of a sudden, the team are charging headlong into the face of this project’s inevitable conclusion. Six weeks, they said! At times, it feels like this project has lasted twice that length, but with the end looming and much to do … blink, and you might well miss it.
All 4 programmers again volunteered their Saturdays to bring us closer to the brink of success. Josh continued touching up Level 3 today, and he tackled the remains of the scoring system and player feedback to make it clear and effective. Christina continued to develop player state assets, particularly the canned animations and more map features, which has been invaluable help in setting up the levels and polishing up the player actions. Alex again revamped some of the behind the scenes code to improve efficiency and make more of the game’s features easier to implement. He put some finishing touches into level 1 that should hopefully see to it’s conclusion. I completed the tutorial level’s functionality as required by the designers, and continued to put key features into Level 2.
So, for next week … there are still a couple of minor player states to add, and there are still some issues with the player states and controls that require fixing. There are still some level features to implement for most levels … and most levels need their points systems fully incorporated and/or BALANCED so that the player has enough scoring opportunities in the game and will be properly rewarded for their efforts. Much of this could not be done today as Pixel was the only member of the design team on hand and he is currently occupied with other task and Rory was not in, so we could not confirm certain design aspects. Game playability will also need tweaking, with changes made to adjust the difficulty of various actions and to make sure the controls respond perfectly. There are also several ideas the programmers are developing to enhance the ’stuntiness’ of the levels which we will put forward to the designers. These are thing we’ve discovered we can easily incorporate that will add to the functionality and fun of each level. These may be a lower priority, but assuming we manage to get on top of everything else that is thrown at us. Last, but not least, this week entails a great deal of debugging, as we trawl through an endless list of bugs, from niggling animation glitches to frustrating “how did I get stuck all the way up here???” type errors.
Before I sign off, I have to congratulate the art team … these 4 levels are visually looking great!!! We were all impressed with the visuals for level 1 (which we laboured over for so long while developing this game that we couldn’t wait to move on to later levels). The final background for level 2 was put in today, and it’s looking greatly improved over the earlier version. Level 3 looks quite spectacular … very beautifully coloured. And then there’s Clyde’s Tutorial level … that boy just schooled the LucasArts team!
Colin
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