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.

Sprint the 1st of this semester

I have been put on getting some of the Main menu stuff working. What I have accomplished this sprint is getting my Layout scheme, that I worked on at the beginning of the project, to work with a place in our Options menu. I have created multiple Layouts that get cycled through.The coding is in place, I just need a graphical representation of what layouts are being cycled through.  I was also assigned to get all the avatars of signed in players onto the start screen. I have code in place to test this and I will be testing it in the near future.
So far this sprint we are working quickly to have a game we can submit for approval and start the testing sequence of the xblig dev process.
Also on the plate to do is to test games with our business license. We are approaching deadlines and things are getting tight. Today we are hopefully going to have a level and more in the game.

Second Semester

The semester has started and out team has hit the ground running. We had a good sit down meeting to really flesh out out game and the direction we are going.
We really nailed down what the UI system is going to be. and some of the GUI elements. My job right now is to make the menu system look and reacted nice to the player input. First we are going to add the players avatar onto the start menu screen. This start menu screen will give the player the feel of there avatar is what they are playing with. We are adding the ability to press buttons besides start and see different ninja moves that your character will have in the game. Though there will be a scripted sequence that you can watch if you don't want to press buttons. My next task is to take the ability to have multiple layouts that I created last semester and add it to the Options screen.

So some of the cool things we have decided was the starting tutorial like area of your avatar breaking out of a prison cell. This will give you small challenges to learn how to move throughout the game. When you finish getting out of the prison cell. When you get out your character set out to complete trials/quests/objectives.
I will post pictures ect once things change and get working.

ALPHA!!!!

We did it! We made it to alpha. I was assigned to work on the UI HUD for the player and getting the menu system to have all the art from the programmers. Making the UI appear for each player on the multiplayer split screen has proven to be my hardest challenge.

 This is when I started the HUD it only has the scroll on the top right.

The Game menu Screen.

Multiplayer Screen with health and Energy Bars. They get lower when you get hit or use and ability.
A TODO for me is adding numbers on them so you can see how much you have.

Mind you these screen shots are w/o the Xbox avatars. They will be in place when deploying to the Xbox. Our animators have lots of good animations for running and jumping and wall running. :)

Long Sprint of 3-4

I've been continuing work on the cameras, but I have also been assigned the UI of the game. I've found some free domain UI Screen Managers that will help us with GUI HUD and UI controls. I've been working with Ron Romero to put in place a the screen system where the games starts out on a main menu screen and we can go from there to the Game screen. There are some of our coding that needs to be organized to make the screens system better, but it's working right now. I foresee problems when it is coming to a pause screen though, but I'm doing some research and some digging into the problem to help that. I'm a tad worried for our game that we will not have actual gameplay read in the next couple weeks, but only time and work will tell. I'm excited to keep working and getting the front end of the Game to look nice.

End of Sprint 2

My tasks for Sprint 2
-Add Drag to Camera
-Add a Vector grab function to obtain vectors based on the camera position
-Create a Controller Layout/ Mapping code.

Well I got them all finished for the sprint until git attacked. From some human error and the frustration that followed with git all my code got deleted. It's been a fun adventure trying to get my build back up to everyone else's. So far I have the Layout and the Vector function back, but I'm still trying to put the drag back into place. While I was having the frustration of my code jumble there was some major refactoring to have camera's worked so that both the AI and the human player could have a camera. So I have to take all of that into account with my code. This semester needs to slow down so I can catch up. I have a strict homework schedule in place so that I can get all of my project stuff done and also get in line for the next sprint that's due this next Thursday.

Snapshot of current build

So pretty! the level is for testing controls, camera, AI and other things. I don't have the Avatar on there because I built it to my computer not the X-box. More to come in the future :)