Alonso's Development Blog

     I'd say this week was a little more of a disappointment to myself more than anything. I started the week off pretty strong by helping out the team discuss our level ideas a bit more. A big problem I was worrying about initially was that we would keep pushing back brainstorming sessions for this so I'm glad we finalized some level concepts together.    Furthermore, I'm glad that we're going with a concept that merges our own level concepts idea. I admittedly had a lot  ideas for levels that I crammed into that document so merging them together into two remaining maps was nice to hear. I don't really have any complaints in that regard at least, although I hope we're not putting too much work on ourselves with that.    Outside of that first day though, I was going to work with Chance and Blake to create our second map. Ideally I was going to add any unattached scripts we had. However Chance hadn't finished his part as of writing this blog. In tr...

     This week was admittedly a bit of a light week for me. Since we accumulated a hefty amount of technical debt we decided to do a hardening sprint to iron out the largest bugs we've come across. On my end I was tasked with fixing up the XP system because a few problems arose when it came to leveling up. That problem was mainly the fact that the XP kept going into the negatives.    Truthfully it wasn't the hardest fix. I had to make it so the if statements upgraded the XP with the rest of the system. I also decided to add a method to all the change methods that changed the XP bar since I noticed that was something that was copy and pasted in each and every upgrade method and it kind of cluttered the screen. After that I sent the file in for Lucas to test since we were trying out pair programming this sprint. That was pretty nice to have a second reassurance that what I did fixed the problem.    I did have another task I was meant to do which involved...

     This week I primarily focused on improving the upgrade system. Since we're a little over a month in the project I thought it'd be fit to have our upgrade system be tweaked a little to no longer be as simplistic as this used to be. This meant that we had to add in a system for upgrades to increase incrementally, alongside a system for altars to take in different upgrades.    After we met on Wednesday I went right to work the next day doing these changes. I decided to use the upgrade level system we had in the code prior to allow our upgrades to go up in increments of 1 more easily. I also made it so each altar uses a different material depending on which altar it is. I do want to add in a system where materials needed change depending on the level the player is at for that upgrade but for now we're keeping it simple.    Alongside these things I also added in some new PNGs for certain upgrades. Previously the weapon and shield altars used repeat PNG...

     This week I had been tasked with expanding the design of our altars and adding a few more upgrades to our altars. I had primarily started this off by making clones of our initial altar and upgrade UIs before altering things a bit. I had mainly wanted to make a Health Altar and a Movement Altar with their associated upgrades.    The Health Altar had been the first one I worked on, and it had upgrades to the Maximum HP, Maximum XP, and a new Damage Reduction System. While the first one was already in the game, and the second one was easily added to the upgrade system, I had to make the damage reduction system myself. My initial plan for it was to make damage be divided by a certain number, and the resulting rounded whole number would be the final damage. However instead I just multiplied damage by a decimal representing a percentage since that was easier to understand.    The last altar I worked on was Movement. Unlike the Health Altar, the Movement...

     A lot of my work this week didn't really happen until the latter end of the week. I had been given a task to help Blake with the map, in this case adding scripts for the objects in the map that need it. So I spent a lot of the week waiting for Blake to finish the primary map before actually getting to work on adding scripts to the final map.    Setting up scripts was a bit of a hassle since I admittedly haven't kept track of too much of what went where initially. I had to use the original map as a way to outline what scripts go where and then effectively copy and paste that script placement into our new map. While it wasn't the hardest experience, it was very time consuming. But after an hour I had fully gotten the map up and running in one aspect. Especially the ores since those all needed to be mineable.    Next I worked on placing the enemies around the map. This was sort of an extension of the previous task, but became it's own unique thing as...