Last minute work, the trade show, and awesomeness!

So we finally finished, fully prepared for the trade show. The past week was spent mostly on eliminating bugs, making sure all the features are in and working properly, and making everything pretty. There was also some balance changes, but no major features were added in. Some minor features include a cheat menu, better looking post-match statistics, tweaking movement/animation speeds, fiddling with hitboxes, and handling input more efficiently. The character physics were also changed to be less buggy and more responsive overall. I think this was the point where everyone did bits of everything, with less focus on their own areas, and it worked out really well.

Then came the trade show! I don't think we could be happier with the way that turned out :) Winning the project prize was an incredible accomplishment, and shows off the hard work we've been toiling over for the past year.

Thanks again to Jordan/Vince/Adam for being awesome team members, and to Luke for keeping up with us throughout the project's timeline. This was definitely the best subject of our degree, and we had the most fun doing it!

Sooo many bugfixes!

Today we all finalised everything in preparation for the submission of the documentation, code, and other deliverables. The manuals were checked for grammatical and spelling errors, then printed out to be ready for tomorrow. I've also had a lot of fun with bug fixes...and fixing the bugs caused from other bug fixes :)

Also added in a few last minute additions, such as a jumping delay and movement/knockback tweaks. For the most part though, it's down to ironing out anymore of those pesky bugs which everyone but me seems to be able to find!

So much work done!

Over the past 9 days (since the last blog :p) we have all put in a large amount of work into the project. The list of changes is near endless, with heavy focus on bug fixing, neatening the work, and making sure that everything looks good while functioning properly. My focus has been the fighting engine and event manager.
I have also added in a few new features, such as:

• Making training mode independent and infinite
• Storing all of the post match statistics throughout the match
• Adding in "pushing" with attacks (where if a player is closer than the reach of an attack, they are pushed to the hitbox before damage/move inertia is dealt)
• Implemented all the animations that Vince has created
• Added knockback, stuns, and knockdowns to moves
• Failed counters (where the user is in a stunned state until they can recover)
• Setting the range of a move to it's actionpoint (a set point defined by Vince in the modeller) rather than manually entering it as needed
• Separating the physics of the game, so that they can continue to function between matches (specifically gravity, inertia, and friction)

The list of bugfixes and minor tweaks is massive, but the key focus has been making sure the game cannot be abused and player immersion does not get ruined by game breaking bugs.

At the moment, I am finalizing the user manual with appropriate screenshots and updated information, which is near completion and will be ready for tomorrow.

Counter-attacks, bug fixing

Over the weekend I added in a few features to the project, the biggest change being the addition of counter attack. Now, if a fighter successfully blocks an opponent's attack, they have a (changeable) window of .5 of a second to retaliate, causing an instant and powerful attack to occur. All of the values included in this are fully tweakable, so balance changes can easily occur.

Another addition to the moves are separate movesets for each fighter. There is now a base moveset, containing things like blocking and crouching, which is inherited by all the fighter's separate movesets. These contain the rest of their attacks, allowing them to have completely individual moves per fighter. This means that Ivanov, a slow character, can have slow, powerful moves compared to Catalina, who is a fast character, while both executing the same move sequence.

I also did a few minor bug fixes and tweaks, such as resetting the fighters to their start position at the end of a round, and preventing attacks or movement events to be queued up while blocking.

Bug Fixing, Collisioning

I spent about 30 minutes today writing some fairly extensive collision detection code that would solve our problems of players running through each other (if they had enough momentum/inertia) when I realised...I could just change 1 character from the code we previously had and accomplish almost the same thing :) so that was a waste of time!

A little bit more of the object phyiscs stuff was added in, such as being inertia based, affected by gravity, rotating on movement (appearing to roll) and such. I also fixed up a bunch of bugs lying around in the code that people didn't get around to doing.

Lots of work

Over the past week, we've put in a bit of work into project, but today has had the greatest amount of improvements. Yesterday, I helped Vince put together the workings of Story Mode, which is now playable from start to en.

Today I've been working on two things - making combos work as they should, and level objects. The first part was very successful - combos can now be executed as they should, with an additional fun combo added in for testing (hint: hadouken :p). On top of this, all moves now have a range, which does exactly what it sounds like it should. All of the old moves still have the previously set range of 250 for now though, which Vince will be able to sort through later.

The second thing I've been focusing on is physics entities, or level objects. So far, we have blue buttons, that are knocked back and turn red when struck by a fighter's attacks. Eventually, I'm hoping to utilise the animation engine used for the fighters themselves, allowing for background objects that can have animations and react accordingly when hit. Oh, and I'll give them gravity too...eventually...

The AI can inadvertently hit the objects too! These will most likely not affect the gameplay and just be an aesthetic thing in the end.

Prototype complete!

Last night and today I put a bunch of more effort into getting the move system working and up to scratch. Jordan found some sounds for everywhere in the game, so all the attacks make (almost comical) sounds on hit, miss, and block. Vince made animations to go with the new blocking and crouching/crouch moves too, so the game changed into a very playable state in 24hrs. I also implemented a knockback effect (which, like jumping, can be...exuberant at times =p). Jordan polished a large amount of the UI elements of the menus and stuff so the game looks great now.

 The prototype demonstration today went well as well, and tomorrow we will have another skype work day, and hopefully accomplish a tonne more!