Week 5 + 6
A lot of stuff happened in the past two weeks. Read the blog posts for a more detailed explaination. Basically the weeks were spent implementing and designing already thought-out game mechanics and graphics. Some of the major changes that was made were changing the orthographic camera from 207, 137 to 1024, 576. Thus we needed to resize everything in the game so that it would fit with our new viewport. This also made the dimensions of the graphics less pixelated as we used their real size in our 1024, 576 viewport. They would of course need to scale depending on screen resolution though, an implementation that Steven started with at the end of week 6 and is still ongoing but with a lot of progress.
Furthermore Steven succeded in implementing an android ad into the libGDX environment and to generate revenue. Something that we might want to implement later in the development stage. Still looking at the android/ios implementation of facebook sdk and creating a global leaderboard will be challenging! Menu icons was made and a push method are just a few lines of code away.
We also spent some time of the implementation of a fly, instead of the ghost fish. And also brought out the physics book again to recalculate our fish jump physics. Something that now looks more or less flawless.
Week 4
In this week a lot of progress was made into implementing images into our game, the pictures are not close to being finished but it is a good start so that the graphics designers could just swap them out in Git and have it being updated in real time.
We had some discussions about how the origami style should be, Steven prefered hard outlines to give it more of a cartoonish look, and Andreas and Christian did not like outlines. So for now we probably try it out without outlines.
The implementation of the fish physics took the whole friday for the software engineers, as the morning session was used to calculate the physics with pen and paper, and the afternoon Steven tried to implement it into the code, which could perhaps be considered successful in that it does what it should, but scary bugs has been observed. It came when Steven implemented the collider and game reset at game over, that he noticed that the fish physics would be off after the first restart.
Another problem is when Steven wrote the code for the ghost fish, the outline of the fish that is approaching you. The physics don't add up, and we are seeing some very weird bugs that shouldn't be possible, but apparently it is.
We have started with individual deadlines, or at least brought up that it is how we need to be start working now when the project is fully unto its development stages. We started with it losely in Week 4, but we will have a discussion of what everyone needs to be doing in week 5. It should not matter if it is done on the wednesday and friday project sessions or privately as long is it is being done. As for now, all of the communication between the software engineers and graphic designers are taken place in these sessions.
Summary: It was a good week, and we are making progress, bugs are appearing more frequently as a result of a lot of new things being implemented. We are now lined up with our time plan, and there is no indication that we might fall behind.
Week 3
This is the first weekly report, mainly due to the fact that it has taken us roughly three weeks to get the project off its feet. We now have a time schedule with deadlines, distributed responsibilities and set an art style that we all like. The coding architecture has been started and I would say that we now have a strong backbone of infrastructure that would now make it possible for me and Axel (the programmers) to code on our own, given some communication to avoid double work.
The design process at the moment has similarities to the waterfall model, but I believe that we all will opt to go more agile and will perhaps even end up with some SCRUM development spinoff.
The graphic designers are working closely with the software programmers, at this point, we are all just testing out and it is too early to tell if our architecture is good enough coded. I know that there are some things that needs to be fixed, and there exists a lot of ugly temporary fixes, but it is because we feel that it is important to get a working prototype so that the graphic designers can feel and come with suggestions to how their design end up looking in runtime.
The graphic designers are working in vector graphics, but since LibGDX do not officially support vector graphics (SVN/SWF files) and has a really powerful and well build Sprites library, we are converting vector graphics into PNG files and then using a texture packer, we get a TextureAtlas which we then use to import all our images. The animation is as for now being done with 100% our own code, which is good because we know what is happening and how the sprites are being handled.
Summary: We are well in phase with our time plan, and perhaps even one week ahead. And more than definitely is something that we need, because cleaning up the architecture, implementing requirements and creating graphics and animation will probably require more time, it always does.
