Over the past few days I've had quite a lot to do. I've been doing a little bit of playtesting every second night and always looking for bugs and coming across them. Nothing too serious just a lot of over-looking things on my behalf which have all been generally easy to fix. Listing all the bugs in text here may take too long so instead I'll post an image of our Bug board which has a few bugs that have been fixed since then and some that haven't yet (but I'm working on it).
At the meeting Monday night we went over quite a lot of tasks that were complete in our only fortnightly sprint. A few things we discussed were a few tweaks to the game that I would have to make, This includes changing the Blue Canary/Hidden Walls work differently, so instead of measuring the distance between the player and the wall to make the blue canary chirp, we've instead went with a trigger around each destructible wall which makes the Canary chirp. Doing it this way meant that we can stop the canary from chirping through walls between top and bottom floors. Another change was the dynamite, this would sometimes bounce off the walls which meant the dynamites explosion radius was too far from the wall to do anything..... which is a waste of dynamite. Now the dynamite has to be placed inside this trigger for it to destroy the wall, making it much easier to not waste your dynamite.
The other change was the Dust Zones. Currently they are placed randomly and activate at random but after a discussion Adrian though it would be a better idea to have them static so we have more control over them and take out the randomness balancing issue. I made this work and placed them around but kept my old randomising system in place in case we decide to go back to it (as I still prefer it to be random in order to make the yellow canary just that little more useful).
Everything on my end is definitely on track and we've also been encouraged to do a video blog which I might look into doing later this week. I also need to change the design document to correctly match how the game is now which I plan to do in class on Friday. It's exciting to see this started to get playtested, I'm looking forward to finishing the last remaining features and then doing some controlled tests (I just want to make sure its completely playable first).
Andrew.
At the meeting Monday night we went over quite a lot of tasks that were complete in our only fortnightly sprint. A few things we discussed were a few tweaks to the game that I would have to make, This includes changing the Blue Canary/Hidden Walls work differently, so instead of measuring the distance between the player and the wall to make the blue canary chirp, we've instead went with a trigger around each destructible wall which makes the Canary chirp. Doing it this way meant that we can stop the canary from chirping through walls between top and bottom floors. Another change was the dynamite, this would sometimes bounce off the walls which meant the dynamites explosion radius was too far from the wall to do anything..... which is a waste of dynamite. Now the dynamite has to be placed inside this trigger for it to destroy the wall, making it much easier to not waste your dynamite.
The other change was the Dust Zones. Currently they are placed randomly and activate at random but after a discussion Adrian though it would be a better idea to have them static so we have more control over them and take out the randomness balancing issue. I made this work and placed them around but kept my old randomising system in place in case we decide to go back to it (as I still prefer it to be random in order to make the yellow canary just that little more useful).
Everything on my end is definitely on track and we've also been encouraged to do a video blog which I might look into doing later this week. I also need to change the design document to correctly match how the game is now which I plan to do in class on Friday. It's exciting to see this started to get playtested, I'm looking forward to finishing the last remaining features and then doing some controlled tests (I just want to make sure its completely playable first).
Andrew.