Crunch time

It’s Tuesday, the day before we have to complete the game and present it, so it’s crunch time. We did some play testing on Monday an got a list of fixe for the game. Today we had to implement the fixes and do some more play testing.

The fix list

CODE

• Pixel Collission
• PNG's on background
• Turtle bite animation imported
• Turtle Death Animation imported
• Fish animations imported
• Screens (main, pause, victory) states
• Lift free on Boat exploit
• Milestone props imported
• Cloud accelerations (milestone related)
• Enemy spawn curve
• Bubble Effects
• Fish die sooner
• Streepjes terug op de nek
• Floating Water effect (slide)
• Sound Bridge on Cloud
• Pause Option
• Random Fish Colors
• Smaller game scale
• Tutorial flow

AUDIO

• Turtle Death
• Engine Loop
• Poison Cloud Loop
• Textbar Audio (bleep)
• Fish Death
• Shark Bite
• Shark getting angry
  

ART

• Fish Model
• Fish Animation
• Fish to Frames
• Turtle Death Animation
• Start Screen
• Controls Screen
• Victory Screen
• Pauze Screen
• Life Icons (Heads)
• Milestone Props
• PoisonCloud Animation
• Cloud Extension (breeder)
• Textbar redux

Marries, Daniel and I continued coding the game. Daniel was inserting the last visual effects and animations, Marries handled most of the ‘Bug’ fixes and I concentrated on gameplay implementation.
Another important item on the to-do list was audio. As you might, or might not, know, finding good samples on the internet is like finding a needle in a haystack, especially if you want a good sound for a moving cloud of polution. Joerie was the one who was appointed to finding the samples and ambient sounds we need for the game. As you can imagine this was a days work.
Thomas created some final art, and as the teamleader was also responsible for creating the to-do list and tracking our progress over the day. The first thing he made was a new background, we used a vector based image for the background, but it was killing the performance of the game and was replaced by PNG
Anna continued with creating art. Another important item on the list were the menus which still needed to be made, so Anna created them.

Picture of the main menu background.

Around three o’clock most of the fixes were implemented and it was time for some more play testing. Some of us played the game, while I was tweaking the spawn algorithm. There are a lot of factors which come in to play when tuning the gameplay. The combination between speed (of the enemies as well as the toxic cloud), number of enemies spawned and the spawn interval wasn’t easy to get right, but after a lot of playing we nearly got it right. The biggest problem we still have is that the sort of enemy that is spawned is randomly chosen(not completely but still), which can cause situations in which you cannot outrun the poison cloud(desired at the and perhaps, but not at the beginning of the game).
After the gameplay was tweaked we realized we still missed a very important part of the game, a goal. To accommodate a goal Thomas created some more art. He created several milestones and the safe cave which would be the end of the game.

The safe cave