Raptor Racers: Week 3

Work on the game has been going very slow, actually, I don't think there has been any progress since last week. We only had 1 group meeting since the last blog entry, and not much has happened since then. There is a haunting reminder in the back of my head to take more of a look at the existing code base and start adding on to it, eventually I hope to always have the most updated code on my hands.

The reason behind this is mainly our group's agreement that we have to get all (or at least most) of our assignments out of the way before we start to systematically tackle each requirement for our game. It is nice to have homework that isn't individually due to a specific date (like for this class), because this gives us the flexibility to finish them as soon as possible. Unfortunately that can't really be the case for any other class. Graphics, Sound, Accounting and Business for Games all require us to have specific knowledge to complete the required assignments. Various assignments keep popping up every week that surprisingly consume a lot of each group member's time. But we'll try to get most of them out of the way, and start to worry more about our implementations for the game.

The plan is to fix up, and in some cases re-implement semester 1 features and work more on the actual game play aspect of the game until the end of February. Things like improving how the animation system reacts to player input/game world, doing proper collision, proper texturing techniques, proper lighting, fixing the skybox so it isn't stretched to hell, fixing up Raptor textures, etc. It is important that we at least finalize the design and start to realize the limitations we have to work with by the end of February. In some cases, certain game play features might conflict with other parts of the game (Ex. what if our collision system can't handle jumping?). That is our goal for now.

After February we will hope to have learned some intermediate computer graphics knowledge (shaders, texture and lighting effects etc.) to start working on implementing them. This also goes for practicing how to use FMOD with our game, and how to use the FMOD Designer. Sound is the only thing that I have almost no knowledge of. All other fields I at least was curious about learning in high school (and apparently did a decent job at), same goes for the rest of my group mates. We need the time to practice how to record/implement sound into our game properly. This will most likely consume most of our time in March, and hopefully by the end of march we will start to polish features we implemented earlier in the month.

As for April, we will be mostly busy with meeting requirements for this class, and preparing our presentation for Julian's class. I don't think we will have much time to polish our game in this month, but this will have to see.