I worked on A LOT of things this last couple weeks. Coming around crunch week is really bringing in a lot of last minute features. I'll start from the beginning:

Credits:

We tweaked our credits, with better labels and more information in it. We also made it pretty with some traveling images and added a level to play in the background, that may stay or go. Here's some images:







9th World:

We added a new world to the game called "Unnamed - Contest" which requires 480 stars to unlock. The idea will be, if the player beats this level, they can record themselves beating it and get the world named after them. Here's the picture of it:

Popup Triggers:

Launches an image popup or a text popup when the user enters its radius. This allows us to demonstrate things we want the user to learn or experience without forcing them to do anything they don't want to do or keep them from skipping over the information. Here's some images:

Background Particles:

I didn't make these but I turned them into something that we could actually use. They move at variable speeds, but always move with gravity. It's hard to make a picture of this, so expect it in the trailer, but you can look at the pictures above to see these dust particles

I forgot to mention last week that we did a public BETA test and it was very successful. We caught some bugs we were unaware of, and we got some really good feedback from real customers. After this session, I was fixed a lot of bugs and pushed those through, including some graphical bugs we had on xbox. There is still minor graphics bugs that I need to look at, but I'm lacking an xbox to test it on.

Also, I've been working on our marketing, and started a twitter account @AngryNewton. This is so that we can share news and advancements in our project from here on out, and so we can talk to fans. We also started a Facebook page to pull in fans that way. Lastly, I have written an email to a game review at cnet that I've been a fan of for a couple years now, which I'm currently trying to see if he would at least give us a first look or something. A lot of big things happening and we are very excited!

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So we've been working diligently on this brand new World Select, and I think we've struck gold. It looks remarkable and just clearly states everything we want apparent to the user. Its simple and intuitive, and is just good looking. Here are some images:






We have yet to test this on the 360, but we believe it should work right, as it is arranged using relativity.

Edit:
Also fixed some bugs we had with loading that would keep us from becoming official. The game would freeze up for a second on big levels before showing the level. It now shows a loading screen when you start a level to prevent confusion here.
Had a similar problem in the Retry option, but this was capable of being fixed more gracefully.
Also fixed a crashing bug when worlds went over 8.

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We are making sound progress. I've been implementing a new level select this week that is based on a world system, and realized really quick, that we've really hurt our design by keeping in temporary code. Since this is a whole new system, I've had to rework all of this, which is just a beast. I feel like I've been doing it as intellegently as I can so that its open to changes we might need, but we'll see.

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I've done some pretty cool stuff since the last post...most generally, I've worked on menu stuff. Our main menu implements our gameplay as interface. I've got this for the main menu and the options menu. I also worked on the credits screen. It now scrolls and presents our names under specific titles. Lastly, I also created a new xbox project that is now in our repo. This should help us to keep the xbox project up to date

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As of Tuesday, i havent had time to get anything done. instead I've been focused on my other classes which have taken priority in the last couple days. I will, however have some new features added by tomorrow, and expect to see some big progress in the next couple days, so i will update once that happens(if i remember :-))

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Ok, since the 19th, I have added:

-Progressing levels(You can move to the next level after beating the level without having to go to the selection menu)
-Unlocking levels after you beat the level before
-Prepared the code for future high scores and other planned details
-Modded with the level editor for easier level creation(also fixed some small bugs in the code)
-Got the game on the Xbox...This took a long time, due to some conflicts with certain files in the code I guess. Anyway, it works after making a new project and copying the files over and modifying specific preferences. I went through our code and made some changes to help the transition between the 2 easier, code-wise(things like casting lists of objects from a child class to its parent class is not allowed on Xbox but allowed on the PC). I might figure out a way to throw the Xbox stuff on a separate branch in Git. Anyway, it worked without any speed hiccups but had some layout and audio issues that we are working to resolve.
-Worked on the physics engine with curtis. We talked about a way to prioritize collisions so that immediate action collisions don't disregard sound rules like, rails should always stay on their track. We didn't write much code on it, but I wrote out what I think is a pretty decent algorithm and he was supposed to implement it. We'll see how that goes.

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Oh boy, back to the blogs that I always lose track of :S

Anyway, here's a recap of what happened over the break(that I did during the first week I think)

-Matrix collisions, which basically is a continuously updating grid to allow for easy testing for collisions, because only the surrounding tiles have to be checked for collisions rather than the entire set of game objects

-Wall objects, which basically links touching static objects together so if we have a long stretch of wall of 100 tiles, this is only 1 object in the collision list.

-Thumbnail image saving in the level editor. This has since been modified to shrink the image to a 300x300 image before saving.

-Reorginization of the code. The layout is like this now
--Game contains Load, Update, and Draw and based on the game state, will run the Level, or any of the menus. Each of the menus and the level have an Load, Update, and Draw which updates its individual states when running. They are also able to change the game state using a pointer to the one handled by the game.

Since the break, I've added a LevelSelect menu that uses a page system. It divides all the levels defined into 12 groups called pages(no real division when it comes to the place they are stored, but it seems like this to the user) and the user can flip through the 12 on screen or use the arrows to pan through the pages. I've also went through and fixed some bugs that have shown up in the last couple days. Currently I'm looking into making the level selection work world wide. This way we can unlock levels when beating the previous level, and move to the next level after beating the level. Should be easy but we'll see how it goes

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RThis week was another busy week for all my other classes but I did find time to add some new features. First, I fixed some small bugs here and there in the level editor. I also added the ability to use triggers and to translate them and run them correctly. The trigger I made, adds a force to any item that is within the defined range(changeable from the level editor) with a force that is changable from the level editor. The trigger can also be a square or a circle collision. I also spent some time completely rebasing GameObject construction through all its children. This passes the translated entity info to the object so each one can translate itself however it wants. I also fixed the camera, which looks tons better than it did.

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I don't know why I keep falling behind now, but I apologize first off. Between Thursday and Tuesday, I was not able to get any work done at all, except for getting our program upgraded to 2010 and XNA 4.0; Between Tuesday and Thursday, I coded up the translation process between the level editor and the game. This includes launching the game from the level editor, and converting the xml logic into Game logic. Also, this includes fixing all the bugs that arose from this. Since then, I have not had time to work on any more of the project. Its been pretty busy lately but I should have a lot of time the rest of this week(after Thanksgiving :D)

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This might seem lazy, but class is starting right now, so here's all my commits I did since Monday.

commit 645ba7dd956d44892afa3acc028fe4ced2b17ea4
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Thu Nov 11 14:11:06 2010 -0700

Update Additional Properites.
-Now allows loading and saving of entity properties. Also, set up for editing individual entity property values

commit 5867090c50cb90e026b3af7843cfeeb957ad0b3b
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Thu Nov 11 13:56:19 2010 -0700

Update Additional Properites.
-Now allows loading and saving of entity properties. Also, set up for editing individual entity property values

commit c51c2fe3ffe609f7903ea25d7fa3356cbcba40d2
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Wed Nov 10 17:39:39 2010 -0700

Integrate Save/Load for everything

commit ab6c709655871619010bbb7b8246f21c423ca08e
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Wed Nov 10 15:58:19 2010 -0700

Fix Row/Column initialization and Add manual Double Buffer

commit d18d297f97271ec5e369f07147187a8138d9d1f7
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Wed Nov 10 08:53:56 2010 -0700

Add some comments and fix an error with Select tool

commit f84f35f57c8f89979c795c67f76a944a8c2919e5
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Tue Nov 9 23:17:13 2010 -0700

Fix multiselect
-Relocated the drawing points with the drawing offset. Why this worked before and stopped? Who knows.

--Flicker is nearly 100% gone, and definitely good enough to leave be for now
(maybe come back in the future but I don't know why we would).

Definitely release quality at this point(minus few missing features)

commit 3120322c27c5116ccf2ef702419ae0b6180383f9
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Tue Nov 9 21:59:25 2010 -0700

Major improvement in flicker issues. Still exists but much better now(Completely usable now)

commit 10b02b9f518504ce5a5b83417c682f501fd8408e
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Tue Nov 9 21:27:24 2010 -0700

Add some movement prevention code. Keeps things on the grid

commit dc4b4b17e8b0d124ddfcd3899e77b39fa145983d
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Tue Nov 9 21:03:07 2010 -0700

Fix some flicker in Depaint

commit b411fb3de9706270a586a2f7560fc405fed934d0
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Tue Nov 9 14:42:57 2010 -0700

Bug fix, Bug fix, Bug fix, Bug fix...Other stuff...New things :D

commit f38e624094a29a3ea124e82991039777395e7fb2
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Tue Nov 9 02:06:34 2010 -0700

Better Multi-Selection. Looks wonderful...Check it out :D

commit b1bb75adcf6fb88a5261abdc8a1306dfa738b04d
Author: Tyler Robinson
Date: Mon Nov 8 23:43:23 2010 -0700

Merge the 2 GUI's.

This might be summarizing too much, but I've been cranking code better if I don't focus on updating the blog, and since I am posting my progress every time I finish something, why not use that :) Next week will have clearer posts, I hope :D

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Kinda fell behind this week. A lot, a lot, a lot of work has been finished though which I think makes it worthy.

Thursday Progress-
Added a GUI to our backend. Extremely simple but most of it worked as expected, most of the time.
This was shown in class, and was taken very well(I was actually suprised).

Since then, I've been cranking out features. You can now create entities and change their properties. It adds just fine and saves all of this info perfectly. We can also change the background now, there is cleaner drawing, beautiful zooming in and out, selection for single-select and multi-select which draws a selection indicator, better entity movement, and more. I've been just cranking code(as I know my time is little), but its turning out very well and so I'm motivated to keep pumping out more code.

The next plan is to work this code into Jeremy's front end, which shouldn't be too hard since he gave everything the same name, or nearly the same name. Just need to find time to do it.

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A ton of progress this week, but still not as much as I hoped. I have been working on the internal parts of the level editor, and have reason to believe that adding one or more entities, removing one or more entities, selecting one ore more entities, copy one or more entities, cutting one or more entities, pasting one or more entities, undo any of these operations, Redo any of these operations, and some pixel to grid conversions. There is other stuff but I can't remember all of it...It was a lot of logic and a lot of hours that I pushed into it. I've also been managing the Git stuff, and helping everyone who has issues(merges conflicts have been issue lately, so I'll be writing a reference for that soon).

Waiting on Jeremy's front end before I can test this stuff, but its moving nicely on my end.

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Not too much to report today. I've had a pretty busy week with CS4400 and life in general, so I didn't get much done outside of class. Here are the things I did do(including class):

Got the team up to speed on the level editor design. It went pretty well, but we won't know how good or bad the design is until we jump into the work(which I am hoping for a full lab day today so that we can collaborate on the ideas.

All of our CS guys have been able to update to git, which I have fully merged yesterday. We also uploaded the level editor into our project, so the group should be able to easily download the code without any real work. I think that now we have a firm base on workflow, we should be plowing through from here on out.

Lastly, I reviewed the Evil list a little bit. I do believe that its a doable list to work around but some of the things that we have to guarantee really sucks(like absolutely no bugs, whatsoever). I guess we will see how this goes but I plan on bringing it up in the Stand-Up meeting.

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Several things have happened.

First we've made some major progress on git. Casey, Nate, and Jeremy have both been able to push updates to the game(nothing major, yet), and all have said that its easier than it seems(which is how I feel too). This gave me an opportunity on learning how to merge the code, as well as resetting the HEAD of the current branch, along with editing remote branches(I feel these are all important for someone who is running the entire system).

On top of this, I wrote a design doc that further defines our level editor from the original definitions. This can be found here:

https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1moFbTO3htIemgeUpa1-shcrvQ-NwvlS5rE-fLFVWfR4&hl=en&authkey=CP760_gN

Me and Nate have started with writing the code, and have defined a Level(integrated with the Editor Interface that I mentioned in the doc), and an Entity. This is all minus the ability to import and export, as that is still up in the air on agreement with the group.

More on this later.

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As I mentioned, I was tasked with the opportunity to define what a "Physics Engine" would need, and how we would define it. I came up with this here:

The physics engine is built with 3 levels.

Top Level - Gravity Direction Control
---Attributes

* Gravity Direction

---Functionality

* Change Gravity Direction

Second Level - Physics Environment
---Attributes

* Gravity Magnitude
* Terminal Speed
* Gravity Erosion
* Directional Magnitudes


Third Level - Physics Objects
---Attributes

* Gravity Force
* Additional Force
* Velocity
* Position

---Functionality

* Update itself
* Load itself
* Collision Detection
---With other objects
---With the world
* Enforce Terminal Velocity


This is actually all subject to change(and will, most likely)

As a test of the theory, I rewrote some of the engine to reflect this model, and it works pretty well. Most changes that will need to be made is going to be initiated by what the rest of the group decides on their definitions(things like the level definitions and such).

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Alright, we are finally starting to make progress on the good stuff, which makes me very excited. The first exciting thing is that we have just about everyone understanding, at least the basics of git. The art people are going to struggle a bit with this, so I'm working on a new tutorial that uses TortoiseGit or maybe some other GUI that makes it easier on them. Hopefully I can find a good middle ground for them.

Actually, what I was thinking was that maybe we should break our project up for the art people. In the main repo(the one that contains all the programming) add the Content folder to the .gitignore file. From there, make a second project that just contains the Content folder. This way, the art people would not get any of the extra files that they would normally be attacked with, and we could just pull from their repo when any changes are made. I'm still on the edge about it because I'm pretty worried about how well that idea would even work, but it should definitely keep things as abstract and seperate as possible which is a good thing.

The second thing I'm excited about is that we gave out jobs on Thursday, in which the members of our team have to break up all the generic ideas that we came up with for a BETA version of our game. This should be what makes our product backlog and I feel like its going to really help move us forward by the time we meet up again on Tuesday. I've started us a wiki at:

http://github.com/DizWARE/Gravity-Shift/wiki/Gravity-Shift-Development-Wiki

so that anything we come up with is always readily available to all of us at anytime. As for my task, I was given the Physics Engine since I've already brainstormed on the many things that a physics engine would need.

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So I haven't updated my blog this week which is a big oops because I have actually done quite a bit over the weekend, so this will actually go over both the progress I've made between Thursday(10/1) to Tuesday(10/4) and the progress made between Tuesday(10/4) to Thursday(10/7).

Thursday(10/1) to Tuesday(10/4):

Sat down with the code again. The problem with the original physics engine prototype is that if I were to add 10 physics object into the environment, they should all react exactly the same in that environment. So I restructured a bunch of the PhysicsObject code, and have made a new PhysicsEnvironment code that gets passed to the PhysicsObject as a reference. Now, if the player changes values in the PhysicsEnvironment, then any other PhysicsObject that has that same environment will also experience the change. This method may be subject to change(maybe PhysicsEnvironment 's own all PhysicsObjects that are within it, and update each object every time the game updates).

During class: We brainstormed what needs to go on our backlog, which I think came out fairly well. The list is being managed by Curtis(Scrum Master), and we also talked about a very important aspect of keeping things together; Source Control. We decided to use Git, which I was actually the only member who has used Git. I managed to convince everyone on it, and our tasks to do by Thursday is to learn the system.

This morning (Wednesday 10/5) I wrote a tutorial for everyone on how to get Git up and running, and how to use it. Link is here:
http://dizgames.blogspot.com/2010/10/git-instructions-for-team.html

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Yesterday, we presented and it really well. Thd EA guys gave us a handful of suggestions, including not going to extreme with messing with the enviromental variables, and to be sure to convey this to the player in a very clear message. They also said that we should ditch any thoughts on a story, stating that we would end up dragging down the experience. The also said that the gravity change should apply to other objects that make the experience a little more challenging, without stepping out of the realm of reality.

I fully agree what with what they said and feel it is very doable with the system I have already implemented. I'm very excited to see the results on thursday

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Pitch presentation today.

Here's the videos we have prepared for it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MoAxkSiLdV8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17Hh148VNpc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRMOvt0EKoo

And here's our pitch document:

https://docs.google.com/document/edit?id=1sz73S4LqAzh7yqZn1cMQaIPqM69wIPiJqzefQ-EvxaE&hl=en&authkey=COnKsBQ

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Yesterday, our presentation went very well, and seemd to be very well received. We were asked to do a simpler level because watching our more complicated level is too overwhelming to allow the watcher to really catch the gimmick. There is only a minimal number of changes we need to make including the art(wasnt all quite as themed as we want for the panel). we expect to have 2 demos available for the panel to test, which i feel will add to our brownie points with the board.

So far i have added a new level to the game, and have recorded it, though i think I will have to rerecorded once I get our final art

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