Sound and music!

Hello again!

So this week I have been working on getting sound for our game. It is harder than I thought, because if I have too many sounds in the game it just sounds annoying and becomes frustrating to play. What I need to remember is what kind of game it is. Is it important to have sound for footsteps? Or hearing a scream when player gets hit? Things like that you need think about when you implementing sounds. I also have to think of the sound level, so that every sound has the right sound level. Maybe you want one sound to be heard more than another sound, or the reverse. Small changes like that. that is important to think about. Then there is the most important thing, and that is finding the right sound. I have to think what kind of game it is and what I want to convey. Now, I really like to have some humor in our game, I don’t want people to take the game serious. It is a game about cleaning children with sponges that are flying out of vacuum cleaner. It is cartoonish and a bit odd.

So most of the sounds I have been collecting are from freesound.org which is a really good website to find sounds for free. Some sounds that I need are hard to find, like the sound of the player getting smeared with dirt from the kids or hitting a kid with a sponge. Things I am going put in is to change volume and get some music for our game. I really like to have a 15 second loop that is catchy and makes you to keep playing. I will see if I can find one, if not, maybe I have to make it myself.  I think if you have a 15 second music loop it is hard to hear when it ends and it doesn’t change that much. I don’t want the music to be the driving force of the game. I might make it a bit longer, it may fit better. I will test different lengths to be sure.

I am also trying to put the UI in different places of the screen. Right now it is leaning on being in the bottom of the screen. And there is also some tweaking in how fast the parent circles (read more about it in the older posts) are moving and I also have put in a lose condition when the circle reaches the end of the parent bar.

Well goodnight and stay tuned

Anton Larsson-Auna

Parent UI

So what’s been happening? Well for a while I have been struggling with the parent UI, I didn’t really know how get It working and a was a bit confused until I got help and now things looks to be done soon(read more about what the parent UI does in the two posts before this one). So now there have been changes so it is easier to choose what kid that is going to be cleaned before the parents come. Our code structure hasn’t been the best. A lot of things have just been sitting the same class which made it really hard to find code you needed. We had a meeting with our scrum master who showed us UML, basically you draw diagrams to see what classes you have and how they are connected, the code is more structure by doing it and becomes like a blue print for the game. That way classes don’t get tangled with each other, and you have clear picture where to put code and where to find it. I just which I knew about it and that it we used it earlier. Right now all parts of the parent UI have its own map linked to one class that keep track of when they should be used.

I don’t really know what to write about, because I have already talked so much about this in my other post. So I will talk about what I am going to do now. I will now focus on music and sound. We have nothing of it done. So I will create a soundmanager and musicmanager and then I will start finding sounds for everything that needs it. I will probably make a combination of making my own sounds and using sounds form freesound.org which have a lot of sounds for free.

We also had a pre-beta meeting today with our teacher. He told us the game should be a rough finished game. Our game will have a lot of thing implemented for the beta I don’t know if I can call it a finished game. What we are missing right now is animations, collisions for the map, sound, music, put in sprites for the UI, menus, upgrades and the game over and win conditions. Some of these things are almost finished so I hope we get most of things in for the beta.

kids on a bike.

Anton L-A

So much confusion

So this week I have been working on the UI. In detail it is the parent meter, parent circles, arrows and indicators. Now I will tell you what things do and how it works. So inside the parent meter you have circles in different colors, they represent parents that are on their way to pick up their children. To know whose child is whose we will have arrows pointing at the child with the same color as the circle, that way you know what child to clean in time. But our map is bigger than the screen which means we need some way to show what part of the map there are on. That is why we have the indicators. The indicator points where the child is and it also have same color as the arrow so you know which one to follow.

All this need to be connected so that you will have a win and lose condition. If the parents come before their children are cleaned you lose. Clean all of the children before the parents come and you will win.

Right now the code is a mess and not fun to look at, so I won’t show you that.

But here is a mockup of the what I am doing right now. the game does not look like this.

We have also had a meeting today with the teacher about how things are going. They thought we were a lot behind and just hiding a lot of problems. That is not simply true, all tough we have had problems, but always have found ways to fix it. We have had some unlucky moments like the pre-alpha, when we had nothing to show because of many bugs. That we fixed until the alpha showing, which prove that a lot of things are fine I can be fixed.

After that meeting we had another meeting with our scrum master he showed us how much time we had left and how much time we are putting down on things until the beta and final game. Seeing this gave us a perspective on what we need to do and how much work we need to put down before the beta and final game. We got some things left, but we have the right structure of the group we can get it done in time. Some parts of the game we might need to cut. Like the upgrade system, hopefully we don’t so we can play around with other “weapons” to clean children with.

 

Anton L-A

Meeting, meeting, metting.

So it’s been a long time ago since wrote in this blog. So from Monday to Wednesday we have had four meetings. Monday we had a meeting with Finn Engström, we talked about how to better work in a group together. Not criticizes people based on no facts. Tell them what you think they are doing what you do not like. We should discuss in the group about how the dynamic is and what should change to make it better.

Tuesday we had our second meeting with Elias Lundgren he is our programming help. None of us needed any help, yet. So the meeting was short.

Wednesday we first had a meeting with Adam Mayes. We talked in more detail what we needed to focus on in the Design document. We also talked a little bit what our game was about. He seems to like it. After that we had a meeting with Felicia, she talked if there is something in the course or the project we needed.  We talked about programs we missed for our computers.

Later we worked until 20:00 am, I am starting to get the hang on it, tomorrow we I am going to get the NPC done.

 

A-L-A

A day with me

Today I started programing a moving square using W,S,A,D keys, and I made I circle follow my mouse movements in the screen, That could be used as the sight when you shoot in the top view game we are making. I also looked up how to use texture and adding sprites, It is really easy to do. It is not that much to type, to get anything to work in SFML, which is nice for me who have a hard time programming. It feels like SFML wants me to know what to do with easy tutorials and it explain what different things do and I what I need use. I actually understand what things do which is nice. I just have keep reading about it and keep following tutorials and I will learn it.

We also met up with our Scrum master. The whole group was there, which show that we care about the project. I got to hear what our Scrum master thought about our scrum and what we need to do to make it more effective. He showed us in detail what how the sprint planning worked. So we everyone in the group chose tasks to do and how long we thought it would take. I think we are on the right track to making great progress.

Not much more to report we see what awaits tomorrow.

 

Anton L-A

A day of things happing

Today we learned how to set up SFML. I had problems getting it to work at first, but SFML looked easier to use then SDL. I looked into some tutorials that seems suitable for me. Tomorrow I will continue experiment with SFML.

 Later I and the group was metting up, to discuss the scrum with our scrum master, unfortunately he couldn’t come. So we kept working on the scrum and setting up a meeting tomorrow instead with him.

 

Now, what do I think about the scrum. The scum is a really good way to structure up a work.  Everyone in the team know what needs to be done, we know what is things have priorities over other things, we know what is done and what we have left, in an easy document that everyone have access to  and can change in.

I liked to know more about how this work, we will see how it goes tomorrow.