Group Status Report
This week marks the beginning of complicating gameplay to make our game more fun! Evan on the rendering side created particle effects and a space skybox so our game no longer takes place in a teal void. Cora continued her hard work modeling and started sprucing up the planet with towers as well as trees. Carlos added various sound effects including an ambient sound, lasers, and SFX for tower/enemy destruction. On the gameplay/networking side, Priyal, Carlos, and I added a bunch of new features to make the gameplay more complex and fun to play. All in all, this has been a very productive week featuring a lot of team communication gluing together all the individual components, we are all very excited for the coming weeks!
Individual Status Reports
Alex Garza
Concrete Goals:
- Populate the world with towers + trees!
- When towers get destroyed, spawn a particle effect instead of disappearing immediately
- Start tuning bounding boxes to actually be the size of the model
- Spawn enemies in different locations instead of in one spot on the planet
Goals Accomplished:
All of the above +
- Player and tower health slowly regenerate if they have not been damaged in a period of time
- Enemies also blow up into particles when they are killed (thanks Evan)
- 15 second intermission between waves to give players a chance to breathe
- Players can reset the game when the game is over by pressing R
Justification for unaccomplished goals:
- none 🙂
Specific Week 8 Goals:
- Clouds!
- Work with Evan on implementing UI elements
- Health bars
- Tower names
- Game Start/Over screen
- Stress testing the game with multiple clients, more enemies, and a lot of projectiles
- Show tower/player health by using different colored particle effects
- Start working on a system to only allow the game to start once all the clients connect
What I learned this week:
- Not as much as previous weeks since we’re just adding gameplay features on top of the systems we already have. I dabbled in the rendering side a bit more when working on particles with Evan which gave me an insight as to how they’re implemented.
Individual Morale:
- My individual morale is high! We are at the point where we decide a feature would be cool to implement, and we can add it without too much effort. I’m looking forward to testing out our game and focusing on making it more fun!
Carlos Wirawan
Concrete Goals:
- Randomize enemy and tower spawning position
- Add more sfx!
- Enemy follow players on the planet surface
Goals Accomplished:
- I achieved all my goals! 🙂
Justification for unaccomplished goals:
- I achieved all my goals!
Specific Week 8 Goals:
- Integrate UI into the game: helath bar, lobby, etc.
- Add enemy low health warning sound
What I learned this week:
- I learn a lot about how important UI is in game! We are definitely miss something in our game and we believe that UI can add another new level of experience for the players.
Individual Morale:
- I am really happy that the game is coming together. I started to feel that the hard part is already past, we are almost reaching our mvp.
Cora Xing
Concrete Goals:
- Finish coloring Sun God
- Move tower models onto planet by getting the right coordinates for rotation, scale, and positions
- Texture Fallen Star
Goals Accomplished:
- Finished coloring Sun God
- Moved all tower models onto the actual game
Justification for unaccomplished goals:
- Did not texture Fallen Star because coloring Sun God and doing guessing-and-checking to get the right values to place models on the planet each took a lot more time than I expected
Specific Week 8 Goals:
- Fix Fallen Star because half of it is not displaying due to Blender settings I used
- Make bullets
- Start on making UI components
- Cut Bearl’s head off to indicate state that Bearl’s health is down
- Perform similar transformations to other towers
- Smooth out islands on planet because they are very clunky right now
What I learned this week:
- Sometimes hardcoding is the way to go if things no longer make any mathematical sense (cough transforming blender coordinates onto the planet, e.g. (x, y, z) becoming (z, -x, -y) with some additional rotation factor that isn’t consistent across all the models). Just crossing fingers I don’t ever need to go through manually guess-and-checking values on this planet ever again:’)
- Coloring Sun God has made me appreciate the details on the actual statue, especially with its imperfections because I don’t need to be exact with my texture painting
Individual Morale:
- Really happy that things are coming together, and excited to work on UI stuff soon because this is my specialty 🙂
Evan Laufer
Concrete Goals:
- Polish skybox, finish particles, finish octree to merge to main
- Add some basic UI features
Goals Accomplished:
- Polished skybox, particles, etc.
- There are still some issues with particles I am going to leave for later, i.e. because particles have transparency, we need to sort them before rendering to render the ones behind first. I currently only sort the particles from each emitter locally, i.e. if two emitters are next to each other, the particles can look strange due to incorrect sorting. Right now this only shows up if the user kills two enemies next to each other, and doesn’t look TOO bad, so I decided to move on.
- Gonna do basic text rendering tonight.
Justification for unaccomplished goals:
- Octree got punted. Looks like with the current amount of enemies, thing are actually running pretty well, so I focused on getting some UI up instead. I might try to just hack it out tonight before the meeting though.
Specific Week 8 Goals:
- Rainbow particles (Requested by Alex).
- I’ll try to see any rendering features that might help make things look more polished. For one, the lighting looks a little flat, I am not sure what technique is normally used to add more realism to objects.
What I learned this week:
- I learned that you should clean up your particle effects or the game will become unplayable due to sorting 100000 million quads
Individual Morale:
- Excited that the game is really shaping up. Tired because of deadlines.
Priyal Suneja
Concrete Goals:
- Add a minimum number of players required to start the game
- players cannot move till everyone is connected
- Enemies don't spawn for the first 10 seconds of the game
- Add multiple towers
- Add highscore to keep track of how many enemies killed by a player
- Add particle effects when enemies die
Goals Accomplished:
- all of them 🙂
Justification for unaccomplished goals:
- none
Specific Week 8 Goals:
- Add all the towers to the game
- Add UI elements such as
- game over and restart screens
- health bar and enemy wave metadata
- connecting to server screen at the beginning
- Clouds!!!
- Play the game a lot and ask friends to play it
What I learned this week:
- not a lot, we are the point of adding minor additions to the game. I do keep learning more about our codebase, which I thought wouldn’t happen at this point.
Individual Morale:
- pretty good, just looking forward to adding more cool stuff and playing our game!