Good News Everyone!

Great things are happening today.

• Got my new 360 wireless receiver in the mail
• Got Twitter (ATGameDev) follow me for smaller updates!
• I've reworked a ton of images
• I've started composing some of the music

From this point on I'm going to make a few posts a week highlighting major changes. For small daily changes I'll be using twitter so follow me there. Today I'm going to be reorganizing my code to allow for music and make things cleaner.

Organizing

I had to order another wireless receiver for my 360 controls so I haven't been able to write or test code. I have one big reorganization planned this week that will update almost every part of my game. It should allow for sounds and music to be added in easily along with nice menu transitions. I'm going to start coding tomorrow. My receiver should come in by Thursday so I'll be able to test again. Until then I'm planning out the changes on paper.

Player Info

I got a fair amount done today and I'm pretty happy with it. One of the major things was I roughed in the player info during a battle. It now displays number of lives, a health bar, and a shield charge bar. I don't like that you have to look down to see the shield charge so I'm going to make the shield become more transparent as the charge depletes. I feel that it will make more sense to the player that way. I also want to add a number display of life / life total on top of the health bar. There is still work to be done but I'm happy with the current result.

I've noticed the menus could use some sort of animation between screens. The code is a little sloppy too. I want to get the game as playable as possible first, and then I'm going to rework the menu system. That's my plan for next week.

Player info shown in game

More Game Updates

Over the past few days I've added some more game updates to make it look nicer and more playable.
Here's the list so far:

• Throw speed will be a player option
• Friction and air resistance changes
• Player size changes
• Game and editor use their own time (stops problems with pausing)
• Menu options display in the correct spot now

Small Updates

I've finished as much as I could on the menu's. I still have to write the code behind the settings, ability select, and score screen so those are not finished. I have a whole list of tiny fixes that need to be addressed so I've been running through them.

Here's a list of what I finished today:

• Shrink bounds of off screen
• Allow bombs to go upwards off screen without exploding
• Record who dealt damage with bombs (will be used to keep track of kills)
• 5 second timer to reset the last person to damage a player (allows for suicides)
• When a player loses all their lives they're out of the game

Tomorrow I'm either going to keep going through this list of changes or work on the in game graphics.

Blast Lords Menu Day 4

I'm so close to finishing the menus I can almost taste it. I added pop up menus for pausing the editor and game. I also added a way to consolidate the menu options into a really nice class that can be reused for each screen. It allows me to add the options I want and can tell me what is currently selected. One problem I ran into is pausing the game. It messes with all of the in game timers. I've dealt with this before and knew it was coming. It shouldn't be too hard of a fix but I won't get to it until later.

Should be finishing up menus tomorrow!

Blast Lords Menu Day 3

I realized today that the menus aren't a one day deal. It's going to take the rest of this week to get everything polished the way I'd like it. I imported the map editor and game code today and the editor can be entered from the menu. Tomorrow I'd like to get a rough character ability selection screen and the game put in. Then hopefully by Friday the menu can be traversed correctly. Next week I'd like to get the score screen and in-game HUD for the players in, which shouldn't be too hard.

Blast Lords Menu Day 2

After half a day of trying to make my menu system using Microsoft's Game State Management example I decided to stop. There are just too many options for what I need it to do (I understand it covers a ton of ground for menus). So I decided to write my own screen manager and game states and it's been going quite smoothly. I only had time to make the background, start screen, and part of the main menu. I'm not too happy that I haven't finished yet, but at least I got it working and can finish it all tomorrow. Here's a look at the moving background that will display throughout the menu and changing between the start screen and main menu. The background images and font are not final, I just needed something to show up.

Blast Lords Menu Background Animation

Blast Lords Menus

Due to a bunch of errands I had to run today I didn't get as much time to work as I would have liked. However, I did start looking at Microsoft's Game State Management guide to learn how to deal with menus. By tomorrow I will like to have the menu system working (even if the transitions and text look ugly), and have the game and editor ported over to work in the menu.

That's the plan.