When it comes to designing and creating a game, there is nothing more important than teamwork. That's why I'm so glad that I'm in this kick-ass team! We have Andrew the Producer -- the main source of game ideas, who keeps the team on track and knows a hell lot about games; we have Nathan the Artist -- an amazing guy whose artwork defines what we're making and what we'll be making; and Vaibhav the Engineer -- a passionate dude who shows some good programming habits and always willing to contribute. As for me, I'm just a game geek who has, absorbs ideas and tries everything to make them happen. Everyone is highly motivated and I can find passion everywhere in this development process!
Anyway, this is what I did on this week:
Day 1 - Met the group and discussed about the game;
Day 2 - Went through the Lua syntax and MOAI SDK library, ran most of the samples in the SDK and exchanged ideas and possible approaches about the game through email;
Day 3 - Set up a simple scene with the character running a simple walking animation in a gravity world using Box2D. Presented it to the team and discussed about what to do next. Talked with Vaibhav about a different approach of "moving" the character; (I set the background rolling backward so that it would seem that the player was moving forward. It seems to be a clever move at that time and it is actually how some of the cartoons and games do to make the moving work. But we gave up that approach later that day because it would a tremendous amount of work to move everything in the scene backward so that the play could "seem" moving forward.)
Day 4 - Made a to-do list. Set the camera tracing the character instead of moving the background backward. Gave the player an initial speed and set its friction to zero.
Day 5 - Met with the team, talked about a few ideas regarding the game. Discussed with Vaibhav about collision detection (which is vital to our next step), figured out a few things he and I could each work on.
Weekend - Set a constraint on the character so that when it is not on the ground, it can't jump again. Add a jump animation layer to the character.
Things are going much better than what I expected. I was worried at first that I didn't know anything about Lua or MOAI SDK and the game would be hard to get started. But once I started working on it, it wasn't that hard after all. Our progress is relatively fast, however, it's still a long way from "rapid prototyping" , but we're getting there.
What could have been done better:
1.More communication, not just through email, this could make some work easier in so many ways;
2.Find a balance between designing and programming, all the programming serves to the final design, not the other way around;
3.Sleep more~~, problems are way easier to solve when the mind is in a clear state.
What's next?
There are still some problems of collision detection that need to figure out. And once we've done that, we could start working on the smoke (object that push the player up), the ingredients score system, the level layout(jump on the platform, speed control on the hill, make sure the player don't roll over), the file system(save&load) and of course, the UI. I'm also thinking about add different layers to the background and foreground to add more details to the scene and make the screen more "3-D" and active. There are still a lot of work to do.
Things are shaping up well and let's keep it that way.
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