This week has been the busiest week as of yet. After finishing the designing process last week, it was finally time to actually start creating the game. Last week's Thursday we gave everyone deliverables for this week's Tuesday. Everybody kept their word and finished their deliverables. So on Tuesday, we already had three 3D enemy models and a player model, 5 work in progress soundtracks, and we had programmed the 'skeleton' about all of the needed classes. That's a lot already, to be honest!
On Tuesday we came together as a group to talk about our deliverables. The programmers came to our usual meeting place a little earlier and had a talk about the programming. There are two "big" pieces of programming that need to be implemented: the enemy pathing and the levels. Currently we are planning to read both paths and levels out of XML files and we're already done with implementing an XML reader, so we only need to think about in what way levels and paths will be programmed. We've already thought about how we want to make the paths work; we want to make a path a list of coordinates, and make the enemy go through this list and go to every coordinate. For the levels, we are thinking about putting in every single enemy in the XML file manually. This will take some time, but it's easy to work with, so it'll be worth it. Later that day the programmers were joined by the rest of the group and our tutor to have an official meeting of 30 minutes. There we came up with some things that still needed to be divided around the group, like thinking up boss(es) and enemies, a world map, a HUD layout and some other things.
We started with programming the in-game state and created a viewport in the middle of the screen. On the sides we will make an ingame HUD, which will show in-game stats, such as your score, your total high score and an "EXIT" button. Below is a screenshot of the current state of the game and as you can see we have already programmed a playable player into the game. Keep in mind that this image has been scaled to fit on the page, the normal game is full screen and the resolution is 1920x1080. Our player's spaceship can already be controlled. The white space is where the gameplay will happen. We will make a nice background for it, of course, but currently we don't have that yet.
Several of our team members started using Blender for creating the 3D models. That's right, we're using 3D, but we're not implementing 3D models in the game. How will you use the 3D models then, you ask? Simple.The player sprite is a render of a 3D model, which, on its own, already makes it look pretty nice. However, when the player moves to the left or to the right, the sprite will play an animation that makes it look like an actual 3D model!
We are planning to add this feature to every enemy as well. This will make the game look a lot more realistic than with 2D sprites like in the original Gaplus. It will also give that extra feeling of depth in an otherwise pretty flat environment.
As for the AI, the Dynamic Difficulty feature is also being worked on. The way we're going to use this is, based on how the player performs, the AI will make a multiplier, that is a parameter for all enemies that are created. For example, if the player has an abominable hit-rate, the enemies will start having a slower fire-rate
and movement speed. However, if the player knows the game, the enemies will move faster and shoot faster. This will improve replayability of the game and makes the game playable for casual gamers, but for hardcore gamers too.
A few of our team members are thinking of bosses and enemies. We want a diverse arsenal of enemies and the bosses need to be memorable and unique. We also want some kind of background story, that has to link all the enemies, bosses and the player. These points, however, are a lower point on the agenda , so stay tuned for more news about enemies and bosses!
To sum up, the next two weeks we will be working towards the demo on December the 18th. We want to have a playable demo by then, where at least the player can move, shoot and die. The player is already able to move, so that is one point of the checklist.
Well, that's already the end of our weekly blog post, but stay tuned for further updates on our game!
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