Work harder, play harder!

After weeks of hard work and two weeks of well-earned vacation it is our duty to continue the development of LSDude. We have made a lot of progression till now, but there are various things that need to be implemented in the coming time. For instance, Koert has been busy with the levels, Robert with the sprites, Luuk and Kevin with the waves and Jordy with the sound. In the morning of Wednesday, the 8th of January, Kevin made a list of things that needed working on:
- Wave timer (this is fixed and works well, but still needs some work! :D)
- Player can die (fixed)
- Working level(s)
- Good levels (and experience points)

On Wednesday we worked at the university with four of us, which wasn't a problem at all. Jurre managed to fix the wave time without too many struggles and is working well. However, we plan to make it somewhat more appealing than what it currently is. Below you can see an image of the wave timer as it is now, counting down till the next wave. We think this will be quite useful to the players of our game, they will face a lot of enemies that need to be shot down!

On Thursday 9th January, after a long morning of doing Logic, it was time for some more work on our project LSDude. In our weekly meeting, we discussed our progress of the game and how we could accomplish working levels. Afterwards we continued working on the list of points that Kevin put together the day before. Koert joined us today, so with 5 people present we could do a lot in the afternoon and that was important, since we don’t have too much time left if we want to finish the game before the deadline. Jordy continued with making and implementing the sounds and some gameplay features (reload time) and Jurre and Koert put their effort in the levels. Additionally, Kevin helped Jurre with his laptop to make Visual Studio 2012 work with XNA and Ricardo worked on this blogpost and started with the flyer for LSDude.

Last meeting all of us who were there, the only ones not there were Luuk and Robert, agreed that our original concept of the level was not good enough. It looked like neither a maze nor a Pac-Man-like level. So we came up with a new concept. The new concept has a more open map with less connected walls. The general idea is to place a template at a random position, but before it's placed we check if there is a solid wall in any direction of the template, which is placed directly next to the to-place template. To make the level more Pac-Man like we only fill 2 squares in the level (from the upper-left corner to the middle of the level and from there to the bottom of the level) which fill exactly half of the level. Then we mirror this half to the other half, just like the original level of Pac-Man.

We all preferred this concept above the previous one, because this creates a more open and slightly less random level, although all templates are placed at a random position. The greatest advantage of this concept is that there are "no more" closed spaces. The offchance of getting if there is a u-form in the middle of the screen, which creates 2 open places.The chance of starting in such a place is far to low to fix it. The only thing left to do now, is adding more templates to the level, so the variation of templates is larger. Right now, the level looks something like this:

Way better and more Pac-Man-like than we had before! There were a few bugs but were rather small and could, therefore, easily be fixed. Jordy was working on the RPG-weapon and, together with Kevin, realized that the weapon was placed on the left side of the ‘Dude’, instead of on the right side. We also found that the weapon was a little bit too close to the player so by changing values we made it look better. However, the levels did take up a lot of time and the next day will be used for that, too. We worked for about three hours non-stop and were able to do a lot of work this afternoon. Below you can find a photo of us being busy on our project :):

Kevin made it possible, as a player, to die in the game. If the player is hit too many times by the enemies, he or she will not be able to move anymore. Kevin accomplished this by checking the collision between the dude and the enemies in the game. What we still need to do however, is that the level restarts after the player has died. At this moment, the enemies stay at the location where the player died because when playing multiplayer, you will be able to spectate the other player when he or she is still alive. We worked for about 4 hours this day and progress was certainly made. That work made us, of course, a little hungry so we paid the Spar a visit as well. M&M’s and drinks gave us more energy and helped us to accomplish even more! :D

On Friday morning, we started working again at about 11 o’clock on our project. Koert continued his work on the level design and Kevin focused more on programming. Ricardo concentrated on finishing up this blogpost and the flyer. We believed that this day again could be a day on which we would achieve a lot so we immediately started. We started with 3 of us and a couple of hours later (2 hours to be precise) Jordy joined us, while Jurre stayed at home doing his work there. The wave count is only shown in purple letters in the left-hand corner of the screen but it should be more striking to the player so it can more easily be seen.
In conclusion, this week, as the title already says, it was time for us to work even harder than what we already had done before the holiday. This also meant a lot of testing and playing the game. We made a lot of progression and we hope we can continue our hard work and that in the end, our hard work will pay off. This was our first blog of the year. Thanks for your time and enjoy!

- Ricardo