My Projects: The Final Crunch and Presentation

When we met again on the Monday after fall break we received more fantastic art from our Artist Ashley. We now had the assets needed to create our Market Place. In the game after the Prince is launched you are taken to the Market place in order to purchase upgrades for your catapult and other items. We only have the catapult upgrades in our market at the moment. There are three. You can purchase an upgrade that allows you to customize the Force at which the Prince is released, on to adjust the Angle at which the catapult releases the Prince, and an object to adjust the Length of the catapult arm. Kameron and I did a team programming session and got this added into the game just in time for us to show our Executive Producers our game so far.

Three of our Four EP were able to give us feed back as to what we should do before our final presentation of this prototype. On the Art side we were told to make the lines of our objects bolder. The details of the objects just weren't shining through. It was also recommended that we make the objects bigger. It was also recommended that we reposition the objects in our game so that they didn't distract from what our main focal point was supposed to be.

For Engineering we were told to have the catapult arm move with the Prince and to make the Obstacles in the air actually move instead of remaining static. We also told that adding in an achievement system would be cool and we could use a help button to show the physics equation so that the player would know how to adjust the separate components of the catapult.

We took these suggestions to heart and tried to implement as many of them before Wednesday. While Ashley went to work on fixing the art I talked with Kameron on what files would need to be edited in order to make the objects move and then I made the adjustment so that all of the objects moved either up and down, or left and right. I then took the new art from Ashley and placed them into the game. By this time we needed to finish for the day.

Before Wednesday came I was able to add the catapult arm to the game. Initially we were thinking of having the catapult movement be based on a sprite sheet, but as we thought about making it adjust both angle and length we realized that we would need to take one image and manipulate it with code so that it would act correctly. I took the image that we had for the catapult arm and implemented the movement and growth into the game. It was very satisfying to see the arm move, lengthen, and shorten in correlation with the Prince as the different values were adjusted on the scrollbars. It definitely gave the game a nicer polish. I even made it so that after you chose the angle at which the arm would release the Prince and pressed the launch button, the arm would then go back and then launch the Prince. Before the Prince would just take off from the release angle. The speed of the catapult launch even reflects the Force at which the Prince is released. If it's a low Force the arm move slowly, the higher the Force the faster the arm movement.

After this I added an achievement system. At this point I didn't have much time, so I was only able to make three achievements. They correspond to hitting the obstacles in front of the Princess' tower. If you hit the Pegasus you get "Pegasus Rider" the Bear gives you "Bear Trainer" and the Dragon "Dragon Flayer".

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