Like all
good game-projects, poorly directed bar fights and soccer matches, there is a
halftime, and ours is now. For two weeks, we'll be busy skiing, ice-fishing,
sledding, ice-skating, maiming with snowballs with a tad too much ice, clubbing
(both with and without seals), going to Christmas parties, slipping, breaking
bones and trying to get inspiration by climbing infinite, hazardous mountains
(still working on the location for that).
Yesterday we
looked back on the past few weeks and how we can make sure to deliver an
awesome, and obviously better version of Ice Climbers at then end of January.
Although we have made quite come progress, it became clear to us that there is
still a long way ahead of us to achieve our goal, and we need to do that a bit
more swiftly. Or as the Dutch would say it, put
some S.P.I.C.E. up our asses! What opened our eyes were the midterm
presentations last Wednesday, to show our current progress to the supervisors
and fellow students, and to see what they have so far. Our audience, consisting
of five other competitors and some members of the jury, was simply dumbstruck.
Now there is
something you need to know here. Although our game does have some gameplay, a
moving and stunningly handsome character and enemies, the game lacks basic
elements such as a starting and game-over screen, a properly implemented
background, enemy collision, the ability to die, alpacas, serious altitude and
the actual breaking of the blocks. Due to the non-existent start-up screen, we
had to use one from a different game and badly edit our character and name over
the original overlay. Although it was very comical, it was not professional in
the least.
I think
you're beginning to see why exactly our audience was dumbstruck. As for the
rest of the presentation, the jokes were poorly timed and as subtle as a heap
of bricks to the face, one team member who hadn't seen the PowerPoint
presentation yet snickered all the time, and the PowerPoint itself could have
been the remake of the famous web game "Press Space to Win!" (which,
in my opinion, would have performed better as a tech demo than our original
one).
Nonetheless,
our demo was placed fourth out of six. We'll just ignore the fact that one tech
demo wasn't working and another one was still in the making on the back row.
Also, we had without a doubt by far the best sprites of everyone, so great job
on that one team!
Even though
we are all going to enjoy our long awaited Christmas break, we made some plans
for the next two weeks, to prevent ourselves from drowning in a shitload of
things to do weeks before the deadline.
Art-wise, we
want to have all the characters and other sprites and their animations done
before we start school again. Right now we have the main character and almost
all his animations, two enemies, of which one is animated and one still needs a
few animations. Also Spice Climbers ain’t
no Spice Climbers with just a few ice tiles, so we need to expand our
amount of tile types. We desperately need our own menu design, and designing
the UI is also planned for the upcoming weeks. It’s not a lot for the art
department to do, but then again, one of us is going skiing, and in general,
the only two weeks off we get throughout our school year can’t pass without
lots of fun activities planned!
As for the
code of our game, we have decided that a manageable goal would be to have our
game work at least like the original Ice Climbers worked. From there we can add
our own implementations and make Spice Climbers sparkle! In particular, we will
finish the game states and enemies part of the code, improve our collision
detection and add lives, infinity and/or co-op mode. One of the comments we got
on our code is that we lack comments with it. So another new year’s resolution
is to give more comments on what we do in the code. Another one is to make more
use of SVN and our Scrum list.
So for now:
That’s all, folks! To anyone who reads this, we wish you happy holidays, and
tune in later for more!
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