Portia Seater Developer Log

5/3: Group meeting. Constructed our formal project proposal and ironed out the details as to what the theme of our game would be. After much discussion of different story lines and objectives, I nailed down the idea of playing off the "naked at school" nightmare. We all agreed it would be a humorous and original/niche game.

5/6-8: I worked on some storyboarding and different design ideas for dealing with layouts and scrolling vs. displaying the entire map. Did some research on the style and type of game we decided on to help get ideas of some standard design implementations.

5/8-9: Successfully installed SDL after a long period of trial and error. Built a toy game implementation by walking through some of 'Lazy Foo' Productions' SDL game building tutorials on Charlie's recommendation. This helped to clarify for me how some of our code would be structured.

5/10: Begin work on drawing and animating NPC characters using an online program called Piskel. I made a few test characters to experiment with the editor and did research on common ways to design 8-bit characters.

5/11: Group meeting.

5/14: Sketched some more level design ideas adding in details such as power-ups and mapping out potential paths of NPC's. Begun work on documentation.

5/13-15: I spent a lot of time over this weekend deciding on my general character template and then reproducing that for the various NPC's I created. I ran into trouble getting the right and left animations moving in a continuous and smooth walking pattern, particularly when switching from characters with pants to characters with bare legs.

5/16: Begun building levels using the same Piskel editor I used for NPC creation. Created a preliminary small level as a test. Made updates to some documents.

5/17: Made more progress on main player character, which has taken up much more time because of the need for extra details in body shape and movement (as there are no clothes that give leeway to create a blockier silhouette).

5/18: Today in class we discussed the grading scheme and the need to have consistent revisions on our GitHub documentation rather than storing logs and other documentation elsewhere. So starting now, we'll begin migrating our documentation onto our wiki. Group Meeting: We had a longer meeting today where we reassessed the work remaining and made sure everything was assigned to someone specific. Completed main character animation.

5/19: Began work on constructing layout in the Piskel editor from design ideas I had worked on. I create a layout template from which I will be able to build any subsequent layers. The was the brunt of the design work for the walls, as I found it difficult to portray the perspective correctly. The layout I create has a majority of the corners and doorway angles we will need.

5/20-22: Continued work on the level layouts, and experiment with different arrangements from my mock-ups. Begin working on items class for use with potential power-ups and clothing items and run into initial problems with the item displaying. Research game timers implementation.

5/23: Complete level layout and design. Continue work with items class and consult with Charlie about some aspects of the implementation I'm working on. Group Meeting: We meet to coordinate after the weekend and talk concretely about items that need to be completed. We work communally on the code and seek help with difficulties we've been having.

5/24: Continue work on items class and work with the text class to add a game timer that outputs the seconds elapsed since start of game play and rearrange the text on the window. Figure out issue with item not appearing in game. Also accomplishing progress on much of the documentation. Group Meeting: More communal work and consultation.

5/25: Worked on getting documentation up to date, including making wiki more intuitive and easy to navigate. Met with Alex to work together and touch base. Continued work on documentation.

5/26: Got together for a group meeting and work session. Continued working on some documentation and created extra art bits and pieces that we were missing. Drew the second level layout using Piskel.

5/27: Worked on completing a few small items of documentation. Created a pause screen and edited the clothing item art to make it more visible. Added in NPC's on the second level and ran through the whole game to test it is functional and beatable. Tidied repo to be have more intuitive navigation. Added the pause screen into the game and extended the key options.