The Struggle is Real

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This long journey has come to an end but the lessons learned well last. During the past week I had the chance to struggle on working the Level Manager Menu. This was to be a menu in which there was a map of the "galaxy". It would display all the worlds and you can explore the "galaxy" using the mouse. You can only start at the initial planet and once that level had been completed you can move to the next world. From earlier experiences I decided that simplicity is the best model. I based the idea of the map off Donkey Kong Country.



All the planets except the initial one would look dead. Upon successfully completing the mission on that planet it would change from a dead world to a more lively looking glowing world. The player could also see how well they did on a three star rating system. All of this was meant to be hooked up later to the rest of the game. Unfortunately we never had a enough time to do this. I also took time to create some art for the main menu. Again, due to time we didn't have time to put it in.
 

I took great satisfaction in making all of this but it took a great deal of work, learning and persistence. I must admit, it's not easy making something, anything in Unity for the first time. It gets frustrating at times. Sometimes things fail, but patience is a virtue that I feel I have learned as well as gained through this experience. I feel like initially there is this phase of frustration and confusion. Then eventually some momentum starts building up as more and more successful additions are made. So looking back it, the process that I enjoyed the most because when something does work well, it feels really good.

Final

Final Report:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/hajcr8sqm2jdhnh/PostmortemReport.pdf?dl=0

Final Game:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/3mofs4gnwj30pjq/Final%20Game.rar?dl=0

Final(Finally There)

Fortunately and unfortunately our journey has  come to end .Fortunately , because it was a big pleasure taking this courses,  prior to which I  had zero background on game development. Unfortunately, because the class has come to end , which means no funny Tuesdays , testing your game with teammates and with other people anymore. Throughout the course I learned an important things of game development , which is not only about writing game , but also working in a team , setting goal  and achieving  your targets  slowly but surely. Worth noting that my skills on making a game got improved as well. Constant searching for various solution of problems, associated with Unity (game platform on which our game was based on) and C# language helped me to gain huge amount of knowledge in these fields. Now lets shortly go through this 2 month journey and talk what I managed to finishing , what I tried and what I failed on. This , are mostly things that I did not talk in my previous blogs and also final paragraph includes what I did in the final week.

First two weeks were mostly spend on learning Unity and C# language itself and gathering with team and making plans of the project. A  few enhancement on Ui were added  to the game 2d Roguelike  such as making enemies to look in 3d format and attempt made on improving ui on health ended up with epic fail.

Further weeks, some times were  working on AI of player.  At first we considered using A* algorithm  using which enemies would be able to catch a player.  A* algorithm required  three classes  such as Priority Queue , Node class and GridManager. The node class would have handled each tile object in our Grid,representing the maps. A priority Queue class was meant for handling of the nodes,arrayList easier.A Grid Manager was used to manage all the properties of the grid representing the map. Finally , the main class Astar was created that would utilize previously mentioned classes.

Skipping weeks in between , I would finally move to what I worked on for the last week. The inventory class, was created , the player would have items that he could consume and  pick up from the floor. The inventory class would toggle with button I , that is every time user  would click it , it would appear. Inventory class had three buttons, which would classify items according to usability, weapon and all items together. Now the only problem we encountered was connecting it with health bar and other UI buttons of the player.Since ,the inventory was a day before presentation , we did not wanna take a risk of crashing game. So for the final presentation Inventory  of player would possibly be absent.

Final push

In the past week I did a bunch of cosmetic changes.

I added damage visualization. Each time a monster or a player attacks a number appears over the target showing how much damage the target took. The number shows up right over top of the target and slowly moved up over the course of 2 seconds. After that the number disappears.

To go with the last change I also added a "health bar" over all the monsters. The health bar shows "current health / max health". This lets the player keep track of the damaged monsters.

If the player escapes the world without completing the objectives the monsters health starts to increase. The monsters health increases by 10% increments.

I also fixed minor bugs and issues. The player path was highlighting at the start of the turn but now when a player would use an action point. So changes were made to toggle the path on each action point spent. This was clashing with pass button functionality. The tile under the player would toggle on and off when passing turns. If you pass turns quick enough you could see the action points GUI go down in to negative numbers.

Over all a lot of time went in to debugging and testing the existing functionality.

One last step left to get there

Finally finished creating  Inventory for user, inventory contains 4 items , sword, armor, and two bows one for increasing users life the other probably for increasing his action point , still on havent decided on that one.It is night before , final presentation and we are looking forward to finish last minor fixes that we had left from previous week.

Objective Complete (?)

It's been a little over two months since we've started working on this game.

I have added objectives added to the game and they were played in the testing session last week, along with another group member adding AI for the enemies. The game is challenging now, and almost complete. I still need to round out the UI for the game and different world types.

So while objectives in the game are complete, the list of objectives I need to do still goes on.

Almost there ..

Inventory class if finished. We can now store items there .Items are stackable and they don't overlap.There are still small things need to be fixed , however  main goal is to make items consumable and be helpful for player in defiting enemy. Overall  there are 4 items  for enough in inventory .We are thinking about adding more.Right now items are equipment type and usables. Usable help to increase life and action movement of player .Equipment will help in giving more attack power and armor for protection.