Just a few days are left before the final deadlines. Next week we need to deliver loads of promotion material and we'll give some presentations. Hopefully, you can see us on stage next week on Friday at 15:30. If we will be there, it will mean that we're presenting at the award ceremony!
But, before that, a lot of work need to be done on the actual game. The core game itself is more or less finished, but we need to do a lot of testing. We also need to implement some extra features. Last Monday, we had a conference call on Skype to discuss what needs to be done this week, and who will do what.
For example, 2-4 guys will focus on making an introduction video for the game, which will be featured in our trailer and will be shown when you start the game. I don't really want to reveal a lot about this video, but I can assure you that it will be really cool!
Another interesting feature which will be implemented by Jurre and Kevin is the chat system. We already have a chat system, but the output of this chat is only shown in the debug output in Visual Studio. Not really a polished system, as one may say. What they're going to do is create a HUD element where you can view the text, which will look a lot more polished than our current system!
There are two other important features which will be made/improved this week. Jurre will implement a pauze menu where you can adjust settings and quit the game. Quitting the game is currently only possible in the way like you would quit a normal window in windows.
Robert is going to improve the main menu. We already have a working main menu, but it's not really ready for the release of our game. We polish the menu some more, and we can also create a more logical structure in the buttons which take you to the game, settings or test states. As you can imagine, we will remove the test states in our final product.
On Wednesday, we met at 11:00 at our office to spent a whole day on implementing and fixing all this stuff. At the end of the day (about 17:00), we had a talk with Jeroen where he gave us some tips and where we could show him our progress.
After that, it was (finally!) time for our team-bulding activity (we had actually called it a team-building passivity, because we didn't want to get physically active, because we're a bit lazy...). Some people took the bus and other people rode their bikes to the centre of Utrecht. With the whole team, we had dinner at the Mc'Donalds there (shoutout to Robert for handing us discount vouchers so we could get a lot of food for a low price!). When we were done eating (which took a while, as one can imagine), we went to a local bar to have some alcoholic refreshments and to relax after a hard day of work. Sadly, some people had to leave early to make sure they wouldn't be home too late (after all, we had a Logic lecture at nine o'clock the following morning...), so at about 19:30 we called it a day.
Here you can see that our walls now have dynamic colours (click to enlarge)!
Today, on Thursday, almost all of these issues have been solved and the features implemented. The team is really working hard this week to make sure that the quality of our final product will be very good.
We've had some hardship though. Apparently, there were a lot of bugs in the networking system. Because of these bugs, you could get exceptions at random times (even during the game), or you could see a bullet which would be stuck on the screen. Our lead programmer Kevin spent a lot of time fixing this. He rewrote the entire TCP client! There were also some other problems with connecting to a game, but these have (hopefully) been solved now.
Just one day of normal work is left now. After tomorrow, our game needs to be finalised so we can focus on creating and finishing the deliverables. Some are already done, but we still need to create the trailer. We also need to focus on preparing the demo and presentation for next week, but I'm fairly certain we can manage it! Luckily, we don't have a final Logic exam next week for which we'll need to prepare. Oh wait...
We hope to see you all next week on Friday during the Symposium!
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