Red Mawashi's Blog

Well, I’ve been travelling again.  I’m on my way back to the US now.  I made a brief stop in Panama, to see my girlfriend’s college graduation ceremony.

She was kind enough, on her graduation day, to give me some time to work on my project.  Also, the hotel I’m at has free wireless, so I was able to check my email.

Wonderfully surprised, the artist had contacted me with tons of wonderful drawings.  They were all lovely, and I integrated them immediately.  Especially the gameplay screen; I don’t know what I was thinking, using the art I had put together for that!!

Also, I finally took a swipe at the game logic, as well as the game resetting stuff.  It works pretty well, I just need to make some small tweaks on the software.  I hope I get a nice seat on the way home tomorrow, or I’m going to have to phone in sick on Monday.

My ears ARE actually incredibly stopped up.  I can’t hear anything out of the one on the right.

Things I know I need to change:

• Update game logic to stop detecting false positives
• Add data feedback for win/loss
• Figure out some way to use the difficult levels, or take them out
• Get Gamer Tag + Picture
• Render the whole left side of the board, for that matter
• Change confirmation quit screen to score printout screen
• Bugfixes, and maybe more…

That looks like a lot, but I think everything’s in gear for a clean landing on the 23rd.  While I’m not doing anything dramatic, it will still probably require plenty of play-testing; that’s why I’d hope to get it done early, so that I can send it to the artist for further testing.

One thing that I’m definitely not going to have is the tutorial stuff, and probably sound.  Unless I can push that out late Monday night, it’s probably just going to be a gap, which is too bad, given how I slammed the Creator’s Club guys @ PAX for doing the same thing.  :(

How ironic!

I’m not sure if I was clear yesterday, but I DID actually add the trigger help stuff.

Today, I worked on some auto-increment functionality, as well as the code that will actually perform the guess submission.  The processing on the guess (aka – the guts) is not complete, but there’s a wrapper in place that works.  The auto-increment isn’t perfect, but it’s mostly just a matter of fine-tuning, now.  I’d like it to jump to the end if the string is full, maybe.

Things really feel like they’re coming together.

How exciting!

Well, true to my word, I worked on more input handling this evening.

Triggers and Joysticks are floats, rather than binary switch.  That makes them a little rough.

Dpads & Buttons are binaries, though, so I’ve handily handled them.

I’m only filling in the first guess right now, but I’ve also added a gradient shader (probably will remove for an alpha-filtered filler) to show your “current” spot.  Maybe I should update that to a Vector2, while I’m at it…

Tomorrow is a trip to the country!  Also, it’s the marker for only a week left!  I’m still lacking a little art from the artist, but I’m sure she’ll wrap everything up in time.  Still…

How nerve-wracking!

This revision is mostly art objects, with a little code thrown in for good measure.  I’ve been extremely busy with real work, and so I’ve not been able to devote the time I would have liked.  Now that the art is mostly complete, I can begin work on the actual gameplay screen.

My next action will be to lay the foundation in the GameScreen for managing the guesses and signals.  Stretch goal:  make button presses actually add entries to the guess list.

How forward-thinking!

I found my first bug today.  It looks like the transition manager that i set up works perfectly for abstracting where to go between screens, until you have two directions you can go from a particular screen.

I’ve burned about 3 hours tonight trying to figure out how to keep the abstraction without adding extra information; i’m just not sure it’ll be possible.  So, I think I might just have to remove the problem screen for now and come back to it later if I have time.

The good news, however, is that I heard from my artist today!  She had some new pieces for me, which I’ve integrated with great success.  I also sent back some information on things that I’m thinking about for the backgrounds and screens.

Overall, I’m getting very close to wrapping up all of the fluff.  Soon, I’ll need to start working on the GameplayScreen.  That makes me a little nervous.

How stressful!