More Main Menu Work

With a couple weeks worth of playtesting, our team is hard at work putting into place a lot of things we learned. We've focused a lot on controls, camera, and animations. Also our level design is in need of some attention, but overall I think we have got a handle on designing and I'm excited to see what our designers come up with.  This semester has been really really busy with other classes and lots of testing our game getting it ready for the review and submitting process.

I'm still working on the Main menus and trying to make it interactive. I've overcome a lot of hurdles (including now getting my own xbox to run it on). And now I'm just iterating on different layouts and cameras and control schemes for the avatars making them look right and placing them in the right spots. I wish I had a way to get screen shots from my TV, I'll look into it and post pictures if I can. I don't want to take pictures with my phone and have bad res. shots. I'm finally feeling comfortable with my programming skills and with some guidance from some of my team I'm more confident that I can do the tasks assigned to me. My goal is to have the Main menu stuff done by the end of this week and get another project that I can work on :)

Overall this semester has been crazy, but I'm excited to see our game go through the submitting process. \(^_^)/ Hopefully I'll be able to get some gameplay and screen shots up soon.

Playtest in Two days

Our team has our first playtest coming up this week. We are all really nervous and have tons to do. We had a meeting last night to discuss a couple of big key areas that we need to cover. That being having an level loading and playable. We have a starting level created but the process of getting it all loaded into XNA without lagging the game has proven a challenge. Also with one of our artist leaving last week, stress has been high. Time has been an impeding factor for almost the whole group. Between this project and all of our other senior classes added on to most of us working so we can stay in school, time has been short. Nevertheless the team is working hard despite the stress. I am still working on the UI and getting the starting screens to be a sort of introduction to the game. You will be able to see your xbox avatar and play around with some animations. It will default to a  couple animation loops if the controller is left alone. Also another block has been passed, I finally got a harddrive for my xbox so I don't have to travel the hour or so to the school to work on the project.

This week is going to be difficult but our team is amazing. I know we're going to pull through.