The changes since our crit:
-Choice of 1, 3 or 5 rounds per game
-New sounds for lily pads
-New info at the top to let players know which power up is associated with the color they’re collecting
-+/- pad only affects the player that lands on it to prevent stalemate situations
-Ability to quit the game
The final Version of Kyle “The Awesome Possum” Audick’s Awesome Tank game.
Featuring
Download it at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~billyh/AIFighter.zip
Source code available at http://www.cs.ucla.edu/~billyh/AIFighterCode.zip
To play you need a PC, the XNA framework that you can download here
and two XBox360 controllers (although with only 1 the game is still functional)
All game modes are working, the game is (almost) completely free of programmer art, and even includes an Easter Egg! Many playtesters really liked the “View AI” option, but we never got the art working, so to access it the appropriate player should press the left trigger from the Player X Beats AI screen.
I’m very proud of all the game modes, especially the ability to save and load different AIs and fight them against each other. Additionally, the teacher mode has improved remarkably in the past two weeks, and you can get your reluctant AI to perform as you wish with it.
One interesting feature that was added recently is AI experience. There were two problems… sometimes very bad players would lose to an AI after only their first go, which wasn’t fun for them. Additionally, (without teaching) sometimes the AIs would both learn something horribly wrong and be unable to fix themselves, which led to endless games where each player would crush the weak AI. To fix this I added a modifier where the AI would start at 60% damage done and damage taken and would increase each game so that it was easy for beginners but difficult for experts in later games.
Enjoy!
These past two days were truly an artistic challenge for me. I spend a ridiculous amount of hours in Photoshop, Illustrator, 3d Studio Max and other apps and I produced almost 1 GIG of assets! I tried many different art styles for the game ranging from real pictures of ponds to sunsets, CG stuff and hand-drawings. Yet none felt good ebough for me. Then yesterday, I realized that what I needed was a very simple and elegant design and I came up with a simple colorful style that I very happy with. The game now has a distinctive cartoon style to it. Besides that in the past two days and made small tweaks and I fixed a couple of outstanding bugs. I also added a title and ending screens which I definitely needed and I made sure that everything works in full screen.
In the final version, there is one little problem with Farseer still that causes the frogs to slide backwards, but it is not critical. I actually have a build that tries to fix this problem, but introduces a load of more serious trouble, si I decided to ditch it.
The final release of the game can be downloaded here.
I also realized that I did not publish my progress last Tuesday, so I’ll copy the post here
Title: *HUGE* Progress
Introduction
As the title says, I managed to make great progress, since last Thursday and now I can claim to have a finished game with the exception of the graphics which is still in a somewhat ugly work-in-progress stage. I did several playtests of the game with different people with quite different age and interest and I incorporated their feedback to add enough polish to the gameplay.
Pills
The pills play an essential role to make the gameplay varied and interesting. I have have 11 different pills in game. You can see the effect of each pill in my video showcase here.
Playtests
I perfomed several playtest to iterate over the gameplay these are some of the general comments I got:
* The game is too slow and takes too long to beat the other player. I addressed this problem by tweaking the amount of damage and the number of available pills for each player
* It does’n make sense to assign pills randomly. I addressed this by removing the randomness completely
* It is hard to figure out what each pills does. I addressed this by adding descriptions in the think bubbles add adding descriptive sounds to each event in game
* You need a timer so a turn does not go on forever. I followed this suggestion by adding a timer
* The sound is great, but you need to add more visual feedback with animations. For example, have the frogs frown when the get damaged. I am working on it.
Bug fixes
I adressed all the critical bugs that could break the gameplay and number of smaller bugs. Two important fixes are:
1) fixed interpenetration problems when frogs are smashing into walls at high speeds
2) added AI code to prevent frog Kamasutra. As Rick suggested I definitely did not want frogs to rest on top of each other, so I created some behaviors for them, so they can get away from each other.
I realized I forgot to list things I’d like to work on in the future in my previous post, so I figured I’d just put it in a new one since it’s sort of a different topic.
Here is the final class version of Psychic Construction company. I made all of the adjustments requested by my testers last time. I also finished off sound with help from my friend Patrick, who supplied voice acting for the psychic character. There is now a full written help section, as well as a button diagram on the pause menu. I added a particle system, although it isn’t used very much: there is a smoke cloud when you teleport (enter/leave attack mode, move across the screen in attack mode) and sparks when the fireball hits something.
I also spent a lot of time trying to get the game to run on XBOX. Getting Farseer to compile for xbox is an enormous pain: when compiling for xbox, there is a FarseerGames.FarseerPhysics.Mathmatics.Vector2 class which interferes with Xna’s Vector2 class. This means that every Vector2 in the game has to be explicitly constructed as one or the other. Once I got that working I discovered that the PC library for farseer doesn’t have this extra class, so all of the declarations of it are invalid in PC mode; I had to add compiler flags for every instance of the farser vector2. After all that, I can compile for both PC and Xbox, but the game won’t run on the xbox. I can deploy it fine, but I’m not sure how to do live debugging, nd when I just run it the screen goes black and then it exits. I think this is related to the fact that I can’t seem to run in fullscreen mode: if I turn on fullscreen, the game tells me that the graphics device can’t be created. At the moment I’m stumped by both of these problems, but fortunately neither of them keeps the game from being entertaining on PC.