Amy Chandler - Week 7 Report

Well, in my report last week I reported that I hoped to finish the character selection screen by the end of the night. I spent the night going down the rabbit hole of our renderer and DirectX and was unfortunately unable to accomplish it. My week this week was interesting. The San Marcos fire (later called the Cocos fire) was fairly close to my home. I spent a night watching the fires, and ended up being evacuated the next day as the fire spread into Escondido. (The fire itself ended up within about a mile of my home, but luckily, very few houses were actually burnt). So, half of my week was gone to the fire. Since Friday evening, I have spent approximately 25-30 hours working on the character selection screen, both trying to render 2D objects with the existing graphics framework within the renderer itself in order to learn how to properly draw items to the screen, and then in learning the fine details and the ins-and-outs of the engine and game repos and client-server communication in order to properly communication the selection screen and state across the network to all clients. Not having a selection state, it won’t be perfect this week. Over the weekend and throughout our meeting tonight, I’ve been picking the brains of my group members for how to best finish the communication for the selection screen and accomplish my tasks for next week.

Concrete goals

• Finally get that character selection screen done!

Accomplished goals

• Local wireframe for UI gameplay
• Local character selection screen
• Client-server character screen selection to be finished tonight!

Problems with meeting goals

• Delayed due to fire and code complexity

Goals for next week

• Implement various game states, including selection, title, gameplay
• Implement player objects including model selection, death count, and power ups
• Draw gameplay UI based on player object

Morale

• Tired. Does that count as morale?
• Frustrated with our game design and how complicated it feels.
• Mildly frustrated with group communication, though our meeting tonight was much better
• Excited after seeing the Ecoli animation and the tube tracking!