Week 3/12 - Submission

So, after another rip roaring awesome week, my team and I have managed to finish our mobile game Disco Wizards.

It has been an interesting 3 weeks, and I've learned a lot over the short time we worked together. Most of all, I've learned to be a better team member and to receive criticism where it is needed and to act on that criticism.

For those who have just joined, my task for the last 3 weeks has been to make a game, a simple mobile game for android. My team agreed to make a game similar to your bullet hell kind of games.  You start the game battling a seedy wizard who shoots energy projectiles at you and touching them causes you to lose a life. Lose all of your lives and it's game over. The wizard eventually powers up, while shooting him delays this power up cycle and also gains you points. When he reaches max power then he gains a level, and also some more seemingly tacky clothing to accompany the new music that starts playing. You can't necessarily win this game, but the goal isn't to win, it's to set the highest score, and of course, have fun.

Over the last 3 weeks, I've learned to work with the unity animation system in many ways to produce good animated UI. While I'm only just scratching the surface of what unity is capable of, I'm sure there is a lot more to be discovered.

Making the UI was a little difficult, and at times I had some issues with the scene file being reverted after I pulled changes from my team members. I managed to get around this in the end by saving the objects to prefabs, that way if someone made changes to the scene, my changes would not be affected. I managed to find my way around the unity animation and animator tools rather well. After my last trimester of work, I was able to get a taste of the animator, so that is one of the actions that prompted me to use the animator this time. After all the trouble I went through to make the UI, I'm glad it turned out okay in the end and that everything works the way it should.

This week I was tasked with making a background for the player. The colored tiles switch patterns to the music. To achieve this, I made a level editor and it's now accessible on phone as well for those who want to customize the patterns in the background. So what this level editor does is when you turn it on, the tiles all go grey and tapping one will turn it on or off. This state is the same for all of the tiles and together they form a pattern. You can create an unlimited number of patterns and the game will load and switch between them with the music when playing. Saving the patterns to file was easy. For each pattern, I created a line in a file and it looks a bit like this "1,1,0,0,1,0,0,1,1,1,1,1,1,0,0,0,0"... Values of 1 are on, and 0 are off. Each line is read on startup and parsed to the disco tile manager that switches between each pattern.

Apart from this I wasn't assigned any more tasks, so I went around commenting my code and fixing various bugs.

I'll see you guys in the next blog, and I'll be working on a new shiny project with a new team and I'll report my progress for this as well.