Problems Again

I’ve had trouble again, getting my power up prototype in my game so I will come back to this, we have a presentation on our progress so I will have to demo aspect I think rather than show a broken game and hope to explain what’s going on. Hoping the presentation will go well as the code hasn’t gone great and there’s been an awful lot of experimentation gone on to get just this far. They say it’s easy to make something complicated look complicated, but to make something that’s complicated look simple is hard. I’ve never heard a truer statement than that in light of my recent work. Ah well, I can’t say I’m not challenging myself.

Power Up Prototype

I posted last about making power up particles well I’ve prototyped it. It works pretty much as how I wanted it, it needs tweaking slightly so that they don’t spawn to close in time to each other. It was quite complicated but as always looks simple on screen, I had to look at it in stages, retrieving the length if the song, collecting that in a variable, using that variable and getting 5 random numbers from the song which will be the actuation times for the power ups, then adding some time so they don’t overlap. I also had to remove 15 or so seconds from the variable song length. Thanks to this project I’ve now killed a good proportion of my favourite songs, when trying out my prototypes. I obviously pick songs I want to listen to but when you’ve listened to the beginning 30 times in an hour for hours, it wears thin. On a serious note prototyping songs is time consuming 3-4 mins per song, to check that out in full would suck up my time, so from early on in the project I’ve made 30 sec (exact) clips to prototype this and scaled down game elements to compensate, so make sure they work in full (song completion) as it were. I wanted the clips to be exact so I can manually time my code to check for consistency. It is a good job I did this, because it was streaming and loading some code fired off before other code had the required numbers. This has led me to decide to load the song before players play the level, there won’t be much of a delay for the player, there will just be a short loading screen before each song which I don’t think is unreasonable considering everything is happening at run time. There is also a slight delay in my particle system between music and visuals, a problem that seems to be common, so I’m hoping this will fix that too.

Game Elements

I’ve been thinking about what game play elements I can have in to make the game more interesting. I’ve thought of power ups for one, you pick up a “power up” particle and this will increase the score of a particle collected for a specified amount of time, say 10 seconds. I thought at first I could just have them load in at any random time in the song but after a quick think I decided I can’t. The problem is if I’m going to have a scoreboard, everything has to be fair for each different person that plays the level (song), so I can’t have the power up load in 6 times for one person, 3 times for another cause that will drastically affect the scores. So somehow I’ll have to retrieve the song length and somehow average it out and make a power up appear say 5 times randomly within that song. I also thought I can’t have one appear under 15 seconds (5 seconds catching time, 10 seconds increased score time = 15secs) from the end of song. This is because if I give the player 5 seconds to catch it, it will be unfair if the power up appears 3 seconds from the end of the song, giving the player only 3 seconds to catch it and then use it. I also can’t have them appear on screen at the same time because it will be one wasted, in short a headache. I’ve thought of maybe an enemy particle that will do the reverse but the code will be similar to that.

Scoring Working

I’ve implemented a scoring system, it simply adds 1 to your score when you collect a particle, I’ll play around with what a particle is worth later on. I’m just happy I’ve got this far after the last few weeks troubles.

Problem Solved

Finally getting somewhere with my code that has alleviated my fears a little. After asking a few other students on the course and on dedicated flash forums I think I’ve cracked that particular aspect of the code. The problem with asking in Uni is, AS3 isn’t taught yet, so me and other students are self taught, Chris for instance is brilliant at AS3 but could only help me so far because he hasn’t taught himself classes yet, and hasn’t got a need to because flash isn’t what he wants to work with. Anyway thanks to some (much more knowledgeable) experts that I on the forums, its working.

Problems...Still

Stress levels high again, same problem as my last post. I’m having trouble removing a particle when I collect it with the character, not to go into too much code detail but I’m having trouble communicating a movie clip on the stage with the particles in an external as. file. They’re created on the fly when one is removed and I think it needs splicing but there’s too much to think about, getting me confused, I have the script to actually do the removing which I’m not 100% works then it’s got to communicate with the character. I have e-mailed James about my concerns because if I have to backtrack on my idea I need to start ASAP.

Problems...

I have been having a lot of trouble with the particle system! Choosing flash over unreal is looking like an error after the last few days. After days of stress, trying to get the game elements in place I’m looking at my options, I’m currently deciding on whether to persevere and hope I sort out the problems in the next week or so, or come up with something that has a greater chance of success. There’s only so much I can say in the document at the end “this is what I would have liked to have done...” before it ends up just been a picture of a game and a load of what ifs. It’s very depressing when I want to crack on with the code to get it out of the way so I can make some visuals and graphics, aspects of the game I don’t mind whittling away the hours with and getting some return. The problem with the code is you spend hours and days trying to get something to work and it can be the most simplest thing on screen when it’s done but the code built up behind the scenes can reach dozens/ hundreds of lines.

Client

Haven’t really had much time on my FMP recently, been struggling to finish the client brief. I and Chris have been working hard to finish code (me taking longer due to inexperience) for the game. I’ve also had a lot of painstaking and slow work to do on that client project, which although simple in the finished result has taken up a lot of my time, but that is nearly over.