Summarize your overall status for the week
Since we were able to make the game playable right now, we are trying to implement more features for the games based on the game we now have.
Refactoring of the game engine. In the past 6 weeks, all of our experiments and testing happened in the Window.cpp file, it is getting more and more complex. The responsibilities of different modules started to mix together. We separate the graphics engine from the window.cpp. Now, we simply initialize the graphics engine in window.cpp by its constructor, and call the update function of the graphics engine to update and draw. It’s making debugging and development much easier.
Optimization for graphics engine. Since we are adding more objects to render in the gameplay, we want our graphics to load those models faster so that we don’t wait too long on the loading page. We are using multi-threading to minimize the wait time. Everything goes well except the rendering part. We will try to fix it this week.
Integration of sound effects. Thanks to Jack now we have our original background music in our gameplay. We are integrating the sound playing into the game so it will be played when the game started. We will later integrate sound with character movement and skills.
Particle systems. Since each character has their skill, we decided to add particle effects to them. We finished the particle system without area lighting and texture. It looks simple right but at least it is usable and we will upgrade it later.
Gameplay design. In the past 6 weeks, we have implemented most of the MVP so we had a discussion this week about what else should we have in our game.
Game scene modeling. Since the wall in our game has no texture, we want to replace it with something looks better. Our artist did a lot of research and is building the entire map as separate models in Blender. We loaded a piece into our engine and we will put the models in our game later.
Character selection. We decide to implement the character selection page feature(one of our Nice-to-have features) this week. And we decided to combine the landing page with the character selection.
Add a statement summarizing the group morale
Add at least one of your latest screenshots to your group page
What were your concrete goals for the week?
What goals were you able to accomplish?
I finished the wall model and some of the obstacle models.
If the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons?
N/A
What are your specific goals for the next week?
What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)
More Blender :)
What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?
😇
What were your concrete goals for the week?
Finish refactoring graphics code. Test animation for game characters. Try to optimize the graphics engine.
What goals were you able to accomplish?
I finished all the goals for this week.
If the week went differently than you had planned, what were the reasons?
The multi-threading optimization did not work very well on the graphics engine for model loading. I was able to load much faster (80% faster) using multi-threading but the object could not be rendered at run-time. So I revert to the previous version, now loading all characters takes about 6 seconds, which is not too bad.
Also, I ended up spending a lot of time playing the new Zelda, so I didn’t do a lot of extra work this week. I was surprised that the underground world of Zelda is kinda similar to our game :)
What are your specific goals for the next week?
Work with the artist to finish all character models and textures. Make animation smooths.
What did you learn this week, if anything (and did you expect to learn it?)
I tried multi-threading in c++, definitely learned a lot, but it seems to work but something is wrong.
What is your individual morale (which might be different from the overall group morale)?
😃