Programming Update - The Finish Line in Sight!

Greetings to all-

I'm in a good mood right now, yes it's 8:23 in the morning but I'm feeling GREAT! The game has made a LOT of progress this week, so that's super cool (details below)!

In addition to being happy, I also have this underlying sense of frustration- other classes are starting to require a lot of time for their respective final projects. This is making me have to break up my work for Casablocka and oftentimes break a streak of implementation where instead of hashing out a feature/function in a day it takes the whole week :\

Despite this annoyance, we will prevail- the game is finally looking and feeling like a real game. Most of the features added this week were based on pre-/post-game experience (menus, win conditions, etc.) and wrapping our "play" portion into a nice package. Here's the list:

* Level Start:
   The screen in the background does a 3-2-1 countdown before the player gets to run! The film reel begins to tick away and unleash the level upon the player and once the countdown hits zero the music kicks in and the player heads down the path! It feels REALLY nice and gives the player a chance to prepare themselves/build suspense for the experience moments away!

* Finish Line:
   The game now possesses a finish line. When the player crosses it the end state is triggered. Speaking of which-

* End State Prototype:
   This was a bit tricky but I was able to make it work. Essentially this is an in-game cutscene of sorts. When the player finishes the level, they jump to the middle ground and begin running fairly slow. The camera jumpes to a position facing the cube at a perpendicular angle and having the screen in the background. The screen (this is the only function that is not yet complete) will calculate the players final score as the player continues to run idle down the track. Eventually he hits a block with a girl on it (needs to be drawn, placeholder is...well...in place) and transfers into it- then they will kiss. It feels super great and reminds me of the endings in old platformers! And it's a cute reference to Casablanca, so like...I'd say it's super appropriate.

* Film Reel:
   The film reel is in the level now! I also made it so the reel doesn't get too far into the distance because players LOVE seeing the level generate around it! Another layer of artistic cohesion :]

* Basic GUI Elements:
   A counter for your time and number of Gold Blocks collected are now in place on the GUI. They really help the player feel immersed in the experience rather than annoyed by the ugly gui-based draw text region. The only thing left to do is decide how to display time remaining for players when they're in score mode (all obstacle blocks turn to gold) and to convert the "time displayed" into frames to feel, as mentioned many times before, cohesive in theme. As of now though I feel the GUI is headed in the right direction :D

* Curtains:
   Matt got me the curtains and they look really good! Functionally, they might need some work but visually they are very stunning! Props to Matt :D

* Level Select Menu:
   I have the level select menu basically completed. I have placeholders as of now, but there are going to be 3 levels to select from. The menu they see presents them with a short clip of gameplay footage from the level and will look really cool once the placeholder footage is gone (3-2-1 clip again) and we have actually screen cap from the game! :D

So that's everything I've been able to implement this week! The remaining work is just filling in the blanks left in the art and finalizing level design. My goals for this week are as follows:

* Create the death/end game sequence (Player stops running, sad music cues, sandbag drops, curtains close, retry menu pops up)
* Fix the score display to calculate in frames rather than actual seconds
* Add the calculation feature to the screen after the player finishes the level
* Add more functionality to the level select screen (show high scores)
* Add more game-scenes
       - Title
       - Level Select (DONE)
       - Retry
       - Levels (DONE)
       - Credits
       - How to Play (??? Do we need this ???)
* Add more of Logan's sounds

It seems like a lot, but this is essentially everything that's left to do. I'd LOVE to get the game "completed" by next week so we can run one more round of iterative play testing on new/old players to see what they think and make level design/game system tweaks from there. I also have a bug that needs squashing, so I need to get around to that too...sooo

* Squash said bug

There. The list is now complete. I didn't expect to get so much done this week, so I have high hopes for this week considering I have even MORE free time (though still selective free time :P). We seem to have momentum again and I'm using up the rest of my fuel to power through until the day we present our game!

Cheers,
David