Started Report Structure

So today I spent the day reading other projects advice on what makes a good project report, short and rich with information without giving all the unneccesary details...

and thus I made this as a beginning to our report, of course it has to be remade along the way, but I believe it is a good foundation to begin with.

Cover page.

The title of the project

The authors

The supervisor

The date of completion of the report

The department and university.

Optional:Diagram or Picture

Abstract
Write this almost last

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to express our gratitude and appreciation for all those who have shown interested and motivated us throughout this project, gameplay testers and concept contributors. Mostly students of MSc Interaction Design & Technologies class of 2015 at CTH, but also friends and relatives. We would also like to give a special thanks to our project supervisor Mr. Björk, whose ideas, suggestions and game design experience gave us invaluable advice regarding game development.

Furthermore, we would like to acknowledge the team behind LibGDX, the open-source cross-platform framework that we used to successfully port our game to both Android and iOS.

Contents

Full page - contents of our report

Abbreviations, Symbols, Acronyms, Nomenclature and Notation Table

List of the above for for clarification of words throughout the report (add if needed, decide while writing report)

Chapter 1 Introduction

Short introduction to our project

1.1 The Aim

1.2 Motivation

Chapter 2 Ideation and Game Concepts
Example: How does Blizzard ideation work? What makes a game good and addicting? What did Flappy birds get its success from?

2.1 Brainstorming

Free-form brainstorming, round robin brainstorming, mind mapping, KJ method.

2.2 Early Game Concepts
Runner game, Immigrant in America, One man Defender, Gladiator Manager, The evolution Frog.
2.3 Final Game Concept
The evolution Frog, sketching art concepts, eliciting game requirements

Chapter 3 Game Development

Which frameworks did we consider? Cocoa2D, Unity, LibGDX? Cross-platform was a strong motivator.

3.1 Architecture

3.2 Game Engine

3.3 Requirement Implementation

3.4 Optimization

3.5 Device Compatibility

Chapter 4 Art and Graphics Development

4.1 Inspired Games and Art

4.2 Methods? Programs? Vector development - PNG deployment

Chapter 5 Gameplay Design

5.1 Gameplay

What gameplay are we aiming for?

5.2 Gameplay Testing

Chapter 6 Finalising Game

6.1 Analyzing Feedback

Chapter 7 Discussion

We had to create our own in-game physics, which took time and made our focus to perfecting gameplay a lot more challenging thus not leaving time for us to progress the gameplay mechanics.

Chapter 8 Conclusions and Future Work

8.1 Time Plan and Bar Chart

Appendix A Game Requirements (Before Development)

Appendix B Game Requirements (After Development)

References

Personal Contact Details

Tuesday November 25

Today I finished the frog tongue implementation without too much trouble. It now extends from the frog's mouth very quickly and snatches the fly. Had to add another variable to fly called isScored that is different from isEaten in that it is used to set whether the fish or frog reaches the fly first. IsEaten is used to show if the fly should be rendered or not.

Also inherited the task to fix the gap between each obstacle from Steven. It's a headache to get the fine tuning between too easy and too hard.

Thoughts and progress

Today we did some finetuning to a few animation but also some graphical content. We felt that the animations was missing some stuff so the wave animation got one more picture that made the looping of the animation more fluent. Also, the opacity was changed as well so it would feel less dense.

Some changes was made to the power up max animation as well. The small “stars” that is used in the normal power up is also used in the max animation. This created a pretty cool effect. Maybe some additional work needs to be done with the colors of the power up.

One setback we had today was that Inkscape crashed which is a pretty common problem when we are creating graphic content. Inkscape doesn’t really work well with the new OS X Yosemite because it’s still in beta. Also, the program doesn’t autosave or create a save of the image before it crashes, so the feature image that Christian created was lost into thin air.

Other stuff that was made today was the pages for credits and game over screen. It was hard to create something that looks potent enough but in the end we came up with something pretty okay. We had an idea of having a cloud or something similar as the background for the score screen in order to make it fit better to the graphic style of the game. But that didn’t look very good and it was difficult to place a menu on top of a cloud. So we decided to go for a simple and clean design of the game over screen. 

Most of the graphics is actually done now and there is almost only finetuning to the existing graphics now. The graphics could be better in some areas but in general it looks pretty good. The style we went for gave us a lot of challenges, but they actually paid off, Christian and Andreas have learned a lot in both Illustrator and Inkscape. Even though the style is not really common today, it could be a style that catches up in the future. We are seeing some advertisements from Samsung that actually uses this low polygon style or “triangle graphics”.

We also did some progress with the game sounds. Now we have one sound for the power up, one jump sound and one for catching the fly. However, they need to be further worked in order to sound better and fit more to the game music.

More gameplay testing and started with the frog's tongue

Today I worked on some more gameplay testing with the frog's gravity and jump power calculation. We want to strike a balance between the frog's jump power and the frequency at which the flies show up. If the fly height is low, the gap to the next fly should be shorter than if the fly height is high. All jumps still have to be doable, but at the same time it should not be too easy. You should not be able to do full charge jumps each time and clear the jump.

Also started work on the frog's tongue. The tongue will show only when the frog manages to eat a fly. It will extend from the frog's mouth to cover the fly. I have a basic tongue implemented, it needs to be slightly longer and thicker though, which is something the graphics guys will have to sort out.
The tongue will have to be rotated to the correct angle, depending on the position of the frog in relation to the fly. I'm having troubles rotating the tongue correctly. It seems I set the origin of the sprite in the wrong way or something so it rotates around some random axis instead of its own.

Tongue is way off where it's supposed to be (I.e. the frog's mouth).