Steven's Dev Blog

Date: January 14th, 2024

This week was mostly a setup / refactor week. First we got setup on GitHub and created a GitHub project to go with it. This will help us manage our tasks and make sure that everyone is able to contribute effectively. Then I created a GitHub tutorial to go along with out project. This is just a small video to hopefully make it clear how we are using git and how to work with it effectively.

Date: January 21st, 2024

This week we started development again. At the beginning of the week I started by creating our GitHub tasks and making sure that everyone had a good understanding of how to use them. Then I worked on the website a bit and getting that up to speed with the new team members. Lastly, I started the first draft of our 11th scrum presentation.

Date: January 28th, 2024

This week presented some more challenges when planning. At the beginning of the week, we had spoken about having an interpreter for our game and using that to read scene data from a text file. This would work great but we felt that it didn't fit the game very well. We are looking to have more of a random approach to levels than having them set within a file.

After planning this week I worked on our scrum and getting a build together. There are a few bugs that we will have to address next week and hopefully, we can start to piece together the new features next week.

Date: February 5th, 2024

This week we did some more planning on the game and the main focus is on replayability. We need to figure out how our game will have more playtime than just 5 minutes. For this, we are thinking about an upgrade system.  After a shift, the player will earn money. This money will then be spent on more upgrades within the shop. This would include more cosmetics and things like more burners for pancakes, another waffle iron, etc. This system should give us some more flexibility.

Other than that I mainly helped out where I could and drafted up our scrum and build. For next week I have a list of a few bugs to be solved and a couple of plans for next week's tasks.

Date: February 12th, 2024

This week we decided to have a Saturday sprint where we all got together and met about the changes we're making for the game. We now have a very clear artistic direction, but the programming still seems a bit chaotic. I believe we are on the right path to fix this and it will take another week to get completely in the right direction. We are putting the pieces in place for components abstracted and this will allow for easy additions / edits to each station. It will also help to make sure that each of the stations are in sync with the music since all of that integration will go through one class. I think it will also be good this week to clean up some more of the stations that we currently have and better integrate them with the music.

Date: February 19th, 2024

This week we decided to have another Saturday sprint and worked on getting the core components of the music integration. So now the music will change based on the distance to the point when drawing. This sets up the framework for a lot of the other music integration and it will be easier for us in the future to add musical changing elements to other components. Mainly I worked on our scrum presentation and we also created a roadmap until the end of the quarter to help with development.

Date: February 26th, 2024

This week was a bit slower for me than normal since I was away for most of the week. We spent a lot of time at the beginning of the week planning and it seems that we have made good progress so far. I have also worked on getting our scrum and website up to spec and making sure that was all set. Next week should hopefully get a few more things polished up in the game and get some stations to their final state.

Date: March 4th, 2024

This week I recorded our 12 voice lines for different combo messages and I think that they came out pretty good. My voice was a little raspy so I think I could make them better but at least this will give us a good place to start. I also worked on creating our next scrum presentation as well as updating the website. 

Date: March 11th, 2024

This week was a bit of a slower week for me since I had some other classes that I needed to prioritize.  For the upcoming week though I will have more time to work on the project. Still this I worked a bit on coming up with a plan for new camera transitions. I want to smoothly animate the camera so that it can be transitioned to any place in the scene seamlessly. To do this I plan to use some form of spline interpolation such as Hermite Cubic Splines. I will start working on this early next week which is our last week!

Date: March 18th, 2024

This week I worked on the main menu implementation. Specifically I worked mostly on getting smooth animations in for both cameras and UI elements. I am very happy with how it came together, but I wasn't able to get it in fully for the build. I had to spend a lot of time dealing with Unity Shenanigans. It will definitely be in for the final presentation and I am looking forward to seeing it all together in the end!

Date: March 20th, 2024

These last few days there was a major effort get the game polished up for our final presentation. We had a lot of the pieces there and just had to combine them all. I mainly worked on the UI and the shop so that people can swap assets out. I spent a lot of my time on making the different buttons that look like pancakes as well as making some animations for the main menu. The camera transitions used my own sinusoidal animations and I love how they came out. Overall, I am very happy with how our game ended up!