The game has been making progress by leaps and bounds in the past week. For starters, much more of the art is finished. The main character has a gun that rotates wherever the player is aimed, and what's more, he has to actually pick up this gun first before it appears on his person. What's more, the gun comes with a backpack, and this pack gets bigger or smaller depending upon how much trash you currently have. The HUD has also been developed; in the lower screen shot on the bottom of the screen you can see the spaces that will correspond to weapon selection, and on the right you can see the space where the possible health/oxygen bars will appear. And taking up the upper right-hand corner of the screen is the fully functional mini-map, which shows the player location, nearby trash in grey, and planets in blue. The backgrounds also look beautiful and polished, as you can see from the pictures. And there are multiple different types of trash: papers, banana peels, etc. Oh, and the first spaceship has been put into Level 1, which will serve as the player's home base throughout the level of the game.
The game has also been advancing from a physics standpoint. The trash gun pulls things in faster and the shooting of trash has been perfected. Gravity has also been implemented; humongous planets have their own gravitational pull and attract nearby trash. Also, if trash is fired at a particular angle near a planet, it can be put into perfect orbit around said planet. This is another nifty feature that we might implement in a level design down the road, ex. Put enough trash around Venus to shield it from the imminent burst of deathly-hot Solar Wind! (Or something like that)
The menu screen that was posted in an earlier screen shot has also been put into use. The player can pick either 'New Game,' Options,' or 'Quit,' from menu screen. New Game launches into the present prototype of level one, and Options allows the player to change his or her screen resolution. Down the road, we intend to allow the player to mute his sound and/or music and perhaps even adjust the difficulty of the game.
Sound has also been implented into the gameplay; the trash gun makes a different sound when it's activated, when it sucks something up, and when it shoots something out. But we still need some ambient space sounds and a sound for radio chatter, which I plan to make as soon as I can.
Our current goals for stage one are to finalize the polish and implent enemies. Enemies can't be put into the level before we figure out how enemy lasers are going to demolish trash and hurt the player, but Eric said he had figured something out today that would make PEW-ing possible. The first level and menu screen need music, so I wrote a few tracks tonight that we might be able to use. I guess we also need to craft the cutscenes that will give the player his direction when he starts playing level 1; we need to figure out if we want to have out-of-engine cutscenes solely for plot purposes, or if we just want to run any plot developement that might occur in engine. I surmise that we'll have lots of questions for our mentors tomorrow.
-Charles
The game has also been advancing from a physics standpoint. The trash gun pulls things in faster and the shooting of trash has been perfected. Gravity has also been implemented; humongous planets have their own gravitational pull and attract nearby trash. Also, if trash is fired at a particular angle near a planet, it can be put into perfect orbit around said planet. This is another nifty feature that we might implement in a level design down the road, ex. Put enough trash around Venus to shield it from the imminent burst of deathly-hot Solar Wind! (Or something like that)
The menu screen that was posted in an earlier screen shot has also been put into use. The player can pick either 'New Game,' Options,' or 'Quit,' from menu screen. New Game launches into the present prototype of level one, and Options allows the player to change his or her screen resolution. Down the road, we intend to allow the player to mute his sound and/or music and perhaps even adjust the difficulty of the game.
Sound has also been implented into the gameplay; the trash gun makes a different sound when it's activated, when it sucks something up, and when it shoots something out. But we still need some ambient space sounds and a sound for radio chatter, which I plan to make as soon as I can.
Our current goals for stage one are to finalize the polish and implent enemies. Enemies can't be put into the level before we figure out how enemy lasers are going to demolish trash and hurt the player, but Eric said he had figured something out today that would make PEW-ing possible. The first level and menu screen need music, so I wrote a few tracks tonight that we might be able to use. I guess we also need to craft the cutscenes that will give the player his direction when he starts playing level 1; we need to figure out if we want to have out-of-engine cutscenes solely for plot purposes, or if we just want to run any plot developement that might occur in engine. I surmise that we'll have lots of questions for our mentors tomorrow.
-Charles
