Sixth week Semester 2

Been making a bit of progress in some areas and none in some others this past week. Got a bunch of assets to use for the game, things like different enemies and some UI components that we can put in. Also been working a bit on getting in different enemies, including some mini boss style ones that will have a health bar attached to them. I got the health bar functionality working in a separate program and will try to incorporate it into the games functionality soon. Haven't heard from Max and at this point things would be simpler if myself and Scott just worked on the project ourselves anyway. The scale of the project would be better suited to a two man team anyway since it is only myself doing the coding for the game. We have just kind of been making the game up as we go along and will probably continue in this style a bit longer but it would be good to get some draft design document stuff done just so we have some more to show for. Haven't been in to talk to Dr. John in a while either but I think he is sick at the moment, but when he gets better myself and Scott will go see him about splitting into a two. I suppose thins are kind of on track, if slightly behind but the sooner we get the group issue sorted then the faster we can get it finished. If it goes to plan and we do just split off into a group of two then we can just churn out a bunch of design stuff to fill out the project and then just add as much as possible into the program. At this point we're both just looking at this as the home straight to finishing University and we don't want any slip ups.

Fifth week Semester 2

Like I wrote at the end of last weeks blog this week was mainly focusing down a submission for a different module. Did spend a little bit of time on a tutorial I had been working on the previous week. Got about half way through the tutorial now and unfortunately hit a wall against an error I can't debug. Spent some time trying to sort it out but couldn't, so I decided to leave it til after this other submission finished. If I still can't sort it then I'll move onto something else and reference the parts I did get to work. Probably move onto one of the tutorials from Scotts College. Got the hand in sent away so I'll be starting the tutorial soon. Haven't heard from Max in a bit and we need to get the design fleshed out a good deal since I want to have a design document produced for submission as well as a couple of other bits and pieces like test logs. Possibly even a technical document. Some sort of storyboards and other similar things need to get done as well so sorting that out is pretty important as we reach the half way point of the module. I'll end this here since there really isn't too much more to say and I'll update again sometime next week.

Fourth week Semester 2

Not a ton to report in this past week, mostly just working on a couple of C# XNA tutorials to prepare for the project. I've not used C# before but did use C++ visual studio for the first two years of uni so the similar interface is making the transition easier which is a plus. The previous C++ and Java experience is definitely helping a lot since C# feels like a bit of a cross roads between the two. So far I feel this was definitely the best idea for starting over this semester. Unity went badly last semester and I don't think it would of ended much differently this time round either. Found quite a few different tutorials for a bunch of different game types in C#. I think there had recently been an update to XNA C# since a bunch of sites have had to update their tutorials. From what I gather though it isn't a huge update and the bulk of code in an older tutorial would still be useful. The main tutorial I'm working on just now is for an asteroids style game which I think is a good place to start since it has a few of the fundamental things we would look to do. I did an asteroids game in Java SE about a year ago so it's familiar territory and really just feeling out some differences in C#. I haven't looked into purchasing a book for C# but the level of the tutorials is quite good thus far so I might not need to get one. On top of the online tutorials there is the C# tutorials from Scotts College course which cover a bunch of different game types and he recommends. Though I think they are from the older version of C# so might need converted to the new version. We didn't have a meet up this week since there was no lecture on the Monday so we'll need to get in contact with Max sooner rather than later. The game design needs a lot of fleshing out as well still. Got a hand in for next week for a different module so will probably focus that down next week and pick this back up after that.

Third week Semester 2

Following on from the previous week, we mostly went away to have a think about what the design of our game was actually going to be. I have always been pretty impartial to what the game designs for projects have been since I normally do coding and have always been happy with what is suggested. The previous semesters game plan was to develop a platformer so we discussed sticking with a platformer and we all agreed we would be happy to make one but thought we should at least explore some of our other options. Whilst thinking about what game to make during the week I talked a bit to my brother about what type of game we definitely did not want to do. The one that we definitely didn't want to do was a fighting game, since we had previously attempted one in a previous project and found it to be quite a difficult style of game to implement that wouldn't be realistic in our time frame. Also making a fighting game would need a lot of sprites which nobody in the group excels at so that would make things much harder as well. Other than a fighting game the only other type of game I would prefer not to make was an FPS since I've never looked into making one before and would prefer to do it on something were I'll have a bit of a background on.

During the next meeting we shared our thoughts on the game design and I basically made the points I previously explained about not developing a fighting or FPS game. Both the other guys were fine with that and agreed we wouldn't do those two. Much like the previous week, the general consensus was that nobody was very opinionated about what we should make more that we just agreed we needed to do something. Scott suggested working on a top down bullet hell game which appealed to all of us, it was something a little different and myself and Max hadn't thought of that. After a bit of discussion we decided that though it was an interesting idea, nobody really had any idea how to go about making the complicated patterns and sprite management that would be required. So we worked it back a little to what we could handle and agreed that a top down wave defense style space shooter would be doable. Since we weren't considering anything else and agreed we should just get started on something we agreed to work on this idea as the game project. We didn't really set any specific goals for the following week, I said I would look into C# tutorials and maybe look for some that would help us with some of the techniques we would need to implement for our game.