Alonso's Development Blog

     This week I helped with polishing up the maze map with Chance. Chance mainly handled the lighting and props, and I did what I've done in the past few maps and populated this map with enemies. I tried to make it a little bit more perilous than the other maps since this is our final level, so a lot of the rooms have close-quarters combat with Elite enemies or generally just hoards of enemies. Although I didn't put too many enemies around since I didn't want to overwhelm the player.    Other than enemy population I also did some refining around the map. I noticed a few walls and ceilings had openings between the cracks that didn't seem intentional, so I sealed those up where I could. I'm not sure if I found them all but I did it to the most noticeable cracks that stuck out to me while roaming around the level. So I'd count that as something.    Lastly I added invisible walls to the railings to players wouldn't be able to jump into the maze and ignore...

     This week was a pretty fun week. I had been put on a task with Blake and Chance to finalize our second map. In this case it meant adding in props and lighting, alongside putting in more enemies and ores. I took up populating the map with more enemies and ores which was in itself a rather lengthy thing to do. As in it took me a good few hours to actually accomplish.    The first thing I did was the ore population. I made prefabs for the individual ores that were not already created. Then I proceeded to sprinkle them around every place I possible could for the map. The starting area has a pretty high ore density, although I put in a few more Emeralds than usual since the first altar would account for them and it'd be needed. The hardest section would probably have to have been the bottomless pit though. There's a lot of area to cover and a lot of possible ore spots. Although I decided to make each of the major outcroppings feature specific ores, with elite en...

     This week I was tasked with helping Rebekah handle the main menu. Admittedly there weren't a lot of tasks this week that I felt like I could really do so the main menu design task seemed like the one of the bunch that I was most familiar with. Especially since Michael and Blake had some specifications regarding how they wanted our main menu to be.    Rebekah and I split our task between actually designing the main menu, and then implementing those design concepts into the game itself. I handled the design portion of it, which mainly just involved making a bunch of mock-ups of potential main menu ideas. Generally most of the mock ups were fairly similar, giving potential ideas for different layouts regarding either two or three button styles.    The biggest thing I wanted to find focus on was the background. Both Michael and Blake mentioned wanting a background that was 3D and showcased the world a little bit. To me this immediately brought to mind...

     This week I was actually able to achieve what I was planning on doing last week. That is to say I aided with finishing up our initial plan for the second map but adding in major scripts that weren't added by the other two. This mainly just meant adding scripts to the ores, which there surprisingly weren't many of. Although I brought that up with Blake and he said we'll add the rest of the ores later when we decide to decorate the map.    After the scripts were added I also populated the area with more altars. This map will have four altars instead of three, and I tried to make the placement of each altar a bit meaningful here. The movement altar is located in the first area which had a lot of platforming, the health altar is in the enemy heavy bottomless pit, the shield altar is before you go into the cramped enemy filled sewers, and the weapon upgrade altar is hidden in the sewer due to the fact that it's the most powerful of all the altars. I just thought...

     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...