Week 4. Menu work.

I've been working hard on my menu lots of times this week. In fact I feel like I'm a little ahead at the moment. While I may have more difficulty making more work with what I have at the moment, I think this is good because it allows me to refine a few more features of my menu and HUD. Something I've been thinking about is tooltips for the achievements and the shop. This means that rolling over the button will allow you to see information, as well as how to get the item you are looking at.

I've also ended up taking more of the shop task as part of mine, mostly because I felt like the feel of the menu should be very consistent. When I saw it last, it seemed against my basic flow feel. But the good of this is that I will have control of the flow and Wes will be able to work more on the characters, their weapons, and possible animations(a newer idea to come into play). By also taking in the shop I will now have to come up with a plan for the buttons and HUD/UI for the shop, but I've got something in mind.

Week 3. Working on menu and HUD.

This week was big on working on the HUD and menu. Unfortunately, a holiday also kept me from working on it. But now that I'm back, there should be more work done. So far though, I have a lot of my part set up. I have basic menu use, player save input ports, and cheat input capability. Now I just need to know what we need for the load and cheats to set them up fully. As well I need to add save ability, a tutorial (help button. Probably late game implementation for when everything is set up), button assets (also a bit later because I need input from shops), and achievement planning (not a core part so last on my list really).

During my work I found that the photoshop mock-ups I made could be imported and used to create the menu. This helped to save some time, though the coding set me back a bit. My knowledge of flash is on the lower side, but nothing that google can't help me figure out. One major problem I was having was with player save/load. I needed a structure to hold the information, but google told me that flash doesn't use structs. This meant that I needed to make classes, which is fine, but they needed to be in another flash code file. Luckily I figured out how to get it set up and working with the main code layer via the import code.

This also reminded me that flash has a different use of code than C++. It doesn't have floats or ints, which leads me to believe that number supports both. As well I found that creating arrays in flash is actually pretty easy. All you need is a var Something:Array, then set Something = [#,#]. Though I might want to look into how it works with parallel arrays.

Week 2 blog. A new game.

This week me and my group went over our new game and how we would work on it. Many parts were taken to be worked on and I have picked the menu, UI, and achievement section for my task in the group. There was a lot of discussion on what we would do with our UI because it requires so much of the gameplay be very solid. This meant that my questions on what we would need to display to the player and what the game needed to work was hammered out. Now with my better understanding of the game and its parts I can get stuff together to make the game nice and functional.

With that said I have plans for how I will work on the UI system. At the moment I only have blueprints for how the UI should look at the end of all the work. It will look like this:

The top left corner of the screen will have the tabs for the menu, the shop, and achievements. The shop will only be usable from the main map screen, which means only a set amount of items can be brought to battle and should be planned and purchased beforehand.

The top right corner of the screen shows the number of units from each of the five types of basic units that you have purchased. Say that you have 10 of the first unit type and 23 of the second unit type, you can click on the one that will be active at the moment in constant build and know how many of that type of unit you have until you have to switch units or until you lose all your units.

The bottom left corner of the screen is the five shop items that you have bought and brought to the battle. Here you can select the type of item the basic unit sent out will have to fight with.

The bottom right corner of the screen will be a console that displays game events. Things like units created, units defeated, and other event things as such. This console will also be used to utilize cheats when they implemented.

Week 1. A new class.

This week was the start of a new class. There isn't much to cover at the moment. Got a group all set up and came up with an adventure idea for our game. We plan to use flash to make the game, which means I'll probably have to look at some online flash syntax. But flash should be pretty good. We are also planing to do it in flash actionscript 2.0 because it is better for working on each piece without over complicating the overall task. Wes has the majority of the game plan down. It is a tower offense game with penguins. There will also be special loot and units that can be gained along the way. I think that it will be an interesting game because I don't think there are many games like it.