Deadline

On the final stretch, we came across many things that we'd like to do. Although I'm highly satisfied by what we've managed to do in such a short time, it is unfortunate that we are unable to complete everything. For the presentation tomorrow, the graphics will be unfinished, but most of the functionality will be present. I'll share a couple problems that we had before going there, however.

Floating point numbers are an interesting beast in the world of computer science. The arithmetic can easily become unaligned when done many times. Our health bar is a clock in the game, and I had gotten it working.  Then, I decided I wanted to animate the clock strokes because it looks much better than a simple jump to where your health currently is. So on the first check in of the code (lines 84 and 90), we had to make a check to see if the current angle was greater than 0. What happened was, as shield and health were depleted, the angle was a little off to the right, rather than at a perfect 0 degrees.

Then we had a new problem. Healing did not animate. What's worse, it didn't even move back up! So we had to add additional checks to get this to work correctly. This all worked perfectly fine before animation, but because we were doing it one degree at a time (1 / 2 * PI), precision was eventually lost. Now, we have a perfectly functional health clock. 

Tonight, I was adding the enemy loader to the game. This way, on loading of the map it will maintain and update the list of enemies for the current dungeon. We had really only tested with one enemy, and other enemies used different components. When loading many of the same enemy, the reference to the AI component was the same to all components. This caused bizarre behavior with the enemies, they quite literally moon walked off the map. Although humorous, with time dwindling it was more on the frustrating side. In the end, I had to create another new instance on load the enemy, and set its properties through reflection. The reward is present though, as our game is looking more and more like, well, an actual game. Some graphics will not be complete, but this is as good as any. It will be a short presentation if anything as there is no real content at the moment. I can, however, show the functionality.

Some may also notice that I added a feed of all of our code commits. For anyone interested in the code (Be wary, it's certainly not perfect), that is your stop.

We'll be building a map to contain more environmental functionality tomorrow since we're very tired after the past week.

Since I'm excited regardless, here are a couple more pictures of our progress!

Thank you to everyone that supported us! We'll likely continue working on this for a little bit longer as we still have functionality to complete, but time is much more precious now that I will be back to work and classes. I will continue to post about various other things, including ideas for the game. I welcome anyone to give us suggestions, and to directly communicate with us about our game.

Until next time!