22 April 2016

Hello All,

Recently we've been working hard on finishing up the game and developing our presentation slides in order to prepare for our final presentation on May 7th. Here is a link to our slideshow presentation:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/14wcdpr5-e8XyPl-CA2wx443TkT4VscDvMRTrAh8ZYVE/edit?usp=sharing

Thanks for your interest,

Alex.

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16 April 2016

Hello interested readers,

Today, Kyle and I visited UC Berkeley for Cal Day and had quite a blast. All sorts of fun events were being ran throughout the day, including a concert featuring indie rock legends, Built to Spill. As the May 1 deadline for college commitments approaches, we are pressed to make the decision for where we will spend the next four years of our life. Although it is a stressful time, we must also finalize our projects.

Kyle and I spent this week adding more breadth to our game, introducing a second level and more characters. Our new characters, the Robodactyl and Squigbot implement projectiles, which we haven't completely figured out yet. Originally, the code we ran gave us error after error, but now none are present. However, no projectile appears on the screen! This is most likely a problem with our "draw" function, and we are currently working to fix this.

For the last two weeks, we are working on polishing up some of the mechanics, such as the projectiles and menu screen, and adding a few more levels and characters. The only big component that we need to add is the boss system, which is a little trickier than it seems. We need to add code that makes the boss act differently from normal enemies, such as following your character and attacking, as well as displaying a boss health graphic on the screen.

We won't be updating the website this week, so we can just lump in all our recent updates in a large upload next Friday; so, stay tuned!

Peace out,

Alex.

P.S. Has anyone found the secret level yet?

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8 April 2016

Hi Everyone,

This week has seen a lot of progress, both in terms of new updates and bug fixes. First of all, the attack system has been fixed, a result of a myriad of 'if' statements and countless test trials. Now, the player can press [X] to attack, but cannot hold it down and stay invincible. The system still has to be polished in terms of animation and fluidity, but that will be resolved at a later stage.

Additionally, a fair amount of new content has been introduced. For example, there are now health packs laying around the map, which heal 20% of the player's health. This wasn't a hard fix, since the object acts essentially the same as the coin, except instead of increasing the score, it increases the player health. There is also a new enemy: The Robodactyl. This is a flying enemy, which, in the future, will drop items on the character, injuring the player on contact. The class we coded for the flying enemy extended the same class as the basic enemy, and had essentially the same code besides setting the gravity to zero and changing the animation.

The secret level has also been implemented, so try to find out where it's hidden :). The level has been extended and will be finalized once the coding for the boss fight is completed. However, we are busy working on other levels and characters to introduce later as well.

Again, feel free to report any bugs or glitches in the comments below.

Thanks for tuning in,

Alex.

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1 April 2016

Happy April Fools,

After our delightful spring break, Kyle and I worked fervently on our project. We successfully managed to add a game over screen and improved health functionality. More importantly, we finally implemented the damage system, albeit with imperfections. We have yet to solve the glaring glitch where the player can just hold down X (the attack key) and gain invincibility.

The reason the attack animation is Frobot holding up a peace sign is not only to fit the disco 70's vibe, but also to allude to the peace sign Mario holds up after he completes a level. The great thing about coding and designing your own video game is that you can have fun with it and put in any easter eggs and references you want. In fact, in the next few days, I will be uploading a secret level to the game, and it'll be your job to find it :).

Currently, the game mechanics process is almost at the end. We just need to polish up the damage system and add a few minor functions. After that, we will churn out levels and characters until the game is complete. I hope you enjoyed this week's update and keep an eye out for future fixes/developments.

Until next time,

Alex

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25 March 2016 - Spring Break

This past week was my Spring Break, but expect many updates in the upcoming weeks.

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18 March 2016

Hi all!

Recently we've been very busy with the coding of our game, but that's about to change. We now have functioning health system, complete with a health bar on the HUD and a small label next to it, reading "Mojo". Right now we're thinking of having the player not regenerate their health at the beginning of every level and just having health power-ups scattered throughout the levels. We have implemented stationary obstacles such as spikes and acid in order to make the game more challenging. We still need to add a menu and game over screen, but both of those should be finished early the week after next (since we will be taking our spring break next week).  The most important changes that we haven't come around to yet are enemy health and power-ups; however, you should expect to see those soon.

Our plan through the end of the project is still to get through all of the central coding and then develop all of the levels and characters. The latter should be substantially less time consuming since there are no obstacles such as coding bugs in play. We're very excited to continue working on this project, no matter the challenge, and we hope you enjoy keeping up with our progress. As always, feel free to leave suggestions for game improvement in the comments section below.

See you in two weeks,

Alex

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11 March 2016

Hi all!

Major updates to our game this week include an extended first level and a health system! While Kyle was continuing our first level, I was working on coding a health system. For a few days, I was stuck, and I ended up posting on the developer's group to find help. They helped out somewhat, but my question was left widely unanswered. I had to learn to fix the issues myself. It ended up being a really simple fix; to put it in layman's terms, the variable for health couldn't be accessed by the file with the health bar, since it wasn't declared as a public variable. I'm quickly learning more about JavaScript and slowly getting used to its syntax and conventions.

Mr. Vange has showed us some really neat ways to bug test our code by using the console.log() function to show us what the code is doing in real-time. This has helped us a great deal with working out kinks in our code.

Our website will be updated tomorrow once I compile all the files and upload them to the servers. Over the course of the next week, we plan on adding the attack system, finishing the first level (complete with a boss), and adding a game over screen and a menu. Upon completing this task, we will have reached our half-way point in creating our game.

As I get more fluent in JavaScript, I hope to be able to pass these obstacles quicker, giving me more time to work on my sprite animation!

See you next week,

Alex.

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