With each milestone, give a brief (3-4 paragraphs at most) summary of what was accomplished during the milestone, any major lessons learned, and how your experience in that milestone influenced your plans for the next (or how you changed things during this milestone based on last time).
During the first milestone, our team solidified and brought together all of the basic outlines and structures needed to start making our rogue-like game. Each week, we progressed by meeting up at available times and brainstorming what could be done in the required time limit and how to orgainze eachothers' work effectively. Because we are all relatively inexperienced, our scope was very large when we first started brainstorming ideas for the type of game that we should make. By combining the pros and cons of each game genre ,we decided on a rogue-like, turn based game that stays relatively simple while still fun. After this, we had to then piece together the assets and machines that would go into this game, and we realized that we should aim small for our product. Adding too many options and extra features for the player would take too much time and were therefore added to the stretch goals. Knowing the realism of everyone's busy schedules, we decided on making a discord so everyone could work from home when needed and still be a part of the group by joining the voice chat. We then used trello to organize the tasks each person had and check if they were still in progress or complete. By doing this, we outlined the finite state machine of gameplay for our product, decided and created concept art and a UI based on the game's theme, came up with the basic program structure needed to create the game, and decided on the the game's, controls, logic, and what ultimately would be the core gameplay. We learned that it is very important to start small with your ideas and that you should only expand them when you have a strong foundation first. Another major lesson was that communication is necessary in order to keep a team environment flowing and working at a stable pace. Without it, it is almost impossible to make progress. Going forward, we plan to communicate more clearly and often so everyone is on the same page and can work effectively. Now that the basic outline is layed out, we plan to build our game with a strong foundation that works well and then add extra features as we see fit.
During our second milestone, we started working on the actual meat and potatoes of our game. The tasks were divided as such: Benjamin takes the character and enemy code, jonathan creates the level editor and tile dungeon creation, Sky works on camera code, Nick makes the menu system, and neville researches OpenGL lighting. Most of these tasks were completed during the time we had for this milestone, except for the external tool and the enemy implementation. The camera movement is implemented in a separate project, we just need to connect the code to our main project.
Yay its milestone 3 time. We kept fleshing out the main features of our game. Its hard, man. Character code is mostly finished, Enemy code is almost done. Neville died, Nick died too. We held a little ceremony for them in the magic center, but got kicked out halfway through because we were making people "uncomfortable" when we tried to make an effigy out of penicls, a broken nintendo ds, and a student human sacrifice. Sky finished the camera code, it looks actually pretty good. I don't know exactly how it works, nor does he. I think he may be the next Dr. Faustus. Jonathan finished the external tool and also took on the massive task of cleaning up Nick's menu code. It might have worked before but like an orphan at a "bring your kid to work" event, it was broken, depressing, and in not where it was supposed to be. I (Benjamin) also started working on shaders, but that is old magic known only by the wizards of DirectX, so I may have to put that on hold until other features are complete.
What a final milestone. On the bright side, nobody else left our group, the warlock pact we made to get our camera class working hasn't backfired yet, and we have shaders. On the not so bright side, work was hectic this week, which is why this milestone documentation is brought to you by me, Jonathan (substitute Benjamin). Quite a lot of cutting out work occured when we realized that our group didn't have very much worktime outside of classes, prepping for finals, etc. The changes we did make were pretty good, but we had some last minute realizations that will come back to bite us. potions work, they can used through our player menu. The player menu is fully functional, if not a little "manual" to set up (think trees practice exercise manual). There are TWO enemies on screen. You can die now. applause Our menu assests are still a little bland. The attacks menu does not contain functioning attacks. The long and short of this milestone is, there is still a lot of work to make this into a recgnisable game. The player will be confused. Keeping this in mind, I still consider this a success. The things that we implemented into this game were fairly new. Even for the people in our group who have implemented many of the same features in other projects, like Ben with shaders, we still learned quite a lot about reading the code that our groupmates make. The player class, and the Tile manager class are key to player movement, and they were made by different people. Our camera class is something that all of us needed to at least have a basic understanding of to make drawing functions work. I would consider this a major learning experience for our group, even if our final project was't the best it could be.