Doubtless my fans (all three of you!) have been worried about my 2+ month absence from the interwebs. Since about mid-May I’ve been swamped with work — homework, tests, obligations from my student group, etc — and have had very little time to log in and read Iris’s forums, much less the time to write any posts of substance (or even lack of substance).
Where I’ve been
The big project I completed recently was making a DS game. Like, a real one and not just a “Look at the pretty collision detection!” homework assignment. Well, I consider it to be a completed alpha version. There are a couple bugs and the interface is crappy, but the main game runs properly. It’s a Tower Defense genre game called “Flower Defense”, in which the towers are flowers and the enemies are bugs. I don’t have any screen shots but if I ever burn it onto a ROM I’ll take some shots of it running from my DS. I intend to continue working on it over the next few years because I would like to use it in my portfolio.
I also submitted a “beta” version of an arkanoid game for my DirectX class and have to submit a “finished” version (with scores, sounds, and animations) by Thursday, but it’s actually a lot more rough than my DS game. Of course, the expectations were different and I spent a lot less time on this than I did on my DS. I’ll be glad to get it over with, because it really is crap.
Where I’m going
Today we decided the groups for this year’s Hal Event Week (HEW) project, which for us is to make a DS game. Our class is 32 people, which divided into 6 groups (4 five-people groups and 2 six-people groups). When deciding who would become the leaders, Masuda-sensei (our teacher) asked for volunteers and we ended up with exactly 6 people volunteering, myself included. So, I’m the leader of a five-person team for HEW.
I’m excited because, despite not getting all my first choices, I have a solid group of smart, dependable people and as long as I don’t drop the ball I think we’ll end up with a good end product. I really, really want to place in the competition this year, especially since I didn’t last year. Winning the gold would rock, but I’ll be happy as long as we win something. Of course, if we can make a really good game, we’ll get a chance to enter it in the Tokyo Game Show competition next June, which would just make me die of happiness.
So, what all that means is that my life for the next 6+ months is going to be devoted to working with my team to make the best damned game ever. We have our first official meeting on Wednesday, where I need to have the tentative Coding Guidelines written up as well as a tentative schedule worked out. This, of course, with me still having to finish my DirectX game and Flash game, as well as write up a one page report on the DS game I finished.
In summary, it’s probably going to be a long time before I update again. But I’ll try to keep a presence on the forums and not let e-mails pile up too badly. Wish me luck!
Current Deadline: Finish game by March 2
Current Progress: Finished: basic game ; Working on: explanatory text, story text
Things are officially going well. Starting last week most of our classes became devoted to finishing our HEW projects. This enabled me to meet the basic gameplay deadline one day early (whoo!).
I had a spot of trouble trying to implement the guard moving independently from the player. I used kbhit() so that the game would only try to read a character if a key was pressed, but I didn’t think to reinitialize the variable I was using so once an arrow key was pressed once it would keep trying to read the direction of the arrow key even though there was no input. Once I got over that hump, though, it was smooth sailing.
The other “problem” I ran into was that my random labyrinth generator sucked. I did some looking into algorithms that I could adapt, but ultimately decided to go with a fixed board. It makes the game a lot easier, but most people won’t play it more than once so whatever.
I actually have two other end of the year assignments (my WB homework is to create a page using javascript, css, and HTML; my CT homework is to do a 1 to 2 page report on a product of my choice), but things seem to be going well. I’m almost done with my CT and can probably get my WB finished today in class, which leaves the text for my game. Which I’m dreading because, well, WRITING IN JAPANESE. It’s the bane of my existence, I swear. But I’ll get it done. Somehow. Probably with the help of my friends.
Current Deadline: Finish basic gameplay by February 19
Current Progress: Start room and level 1 finished
Not sure if things are going better than expected, or worse. On the one hand, I’ve spent a lot of time procrastinating (or taking care of other things). I got sidetracked by an assignment to code a SameGame, which ate up about a week of class time. Then, this week (literally the day after I finished it, of course) my teacher said we no longer had to turn it (people complained that they didn’t have time to do their HEW project). Getting the display to work like I want it to always seems to take twice, or three times, the amount of time I expected it to. And don’t get me started on debugging.
But, I have some time tomorrow during my AS work shift to start on level 2. Since the basic game mechanics are the same as the start room I’ll have a solid base to work with, so that’s a plus. Level 3 is a labyrinth game that I coded for an assignment (that, if I recall correctly, we didn’t actually turn in). I want to make some modifications to it (clean up the board creation algorithms and add guards who move about the labyrinth randomly) but absolute worst case scenario I can do with simply porting it.
Assuming I make the March 19 deadline (ie. have all my levels coded and debugged), that gives me about a week to add the storyline and other text (explanation of the rules, controls, etc). The only problem is that everyone is going to be busy with their HEW assignment so I might not be able to get my friends to proofread my Japanese… which will undoubtedly result in hilarity when my senpai come and play the game. Hilarity for them, that is. Naturally, I will want to crawl under a rock and die.
Even if it does have cringe worthy awesome Japanese mistakes, though, my game is going to rock. Well, as much as a game coded for the console API can rock, that is.
PS. The game has a name: 『魔女の館』 (“The Witch’s Mansion”)! I wanted it to be “The Sorceress’ Tower”, but that didn’t sound right in Japanese.
So, our school year ends after the first week of March, but our normal classes actually end in February. The first week of March is taken up by Hal Event Week (HEW), a competition where students show off their projects (video games for gaming students, web pages for web students, etc).
The second, third, and fourth years have been doing group projects for the past few months, but we first years basically have February to create our project alone. Apparently last year the first years did group projects as well, but there were problems so this year it was switched to be individual.
So! I thought up my game design a few days ago:
Name: Untitled (I can’t think up names to save my life)
Type: Adventure/Puzzle
Story: You (a princess) have been captured by an evil sorceress and have to escape.
Gameplay: Each level is a different puzzle, there are three levels:
- Level 1: You start in a room, when you walk to the door you have to pick the lock (a Mastermind-style game).
- Level 2: You have to get outside by choosing doors (and finding keys to unlock the doors).
- Level 3: You’re outside, but not safe yet! Navigate the labyrinth to find the exit.
I’m stuck using the console API, which means that I can only use ASCII art (no graphics) but the good thing about Japanese is that not only can I use kanji (I’m going to use the Japanese word for princess — 姫 — as the player avatar), but I can also use squares (□), circles (◎), etc. which makes my life a bit easier.
I think I should be able to get this done in a month, especially since I’ve already coded a Mastermind program and I’m currently working on a labyrinth game for my programming class. But, then again, I have a tendency to think bigger than I have time to code, so we’ll see.
I don’t think I’ll win the competition or anything, but if I can make an interesting game I’ll be happy. Anyway, wish me luck!
Andrea Rubenstein