Its a new semester, so now we're having Friday posts.
1. Last Friday was mainly an art day where I did the backgrounds for the title and play screens. I wanted to make a custom GUI, but because I got a new deadline (March 16) so I have to push forward with the more important things. Today I implemented all of my artwork, and wrote the script to generate the blobs. Then I had an issue with the sound and spent a while fixing that, which was a massive waste of time.
2. Next week I have to fix the blob positions so they time right with the recording. I'll also be working on the controller, and possibly recording some music. I want to have 1 song done for my presentation on March 16.
3. The new deadline means heavy prioritizing and a lot more stress to keep working.
Friday, January 27, 2012
Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Wednesday Post 9
1) Today I got the high score functionality in the game, including profile integration and the end of level screen. I also did a title screen. The High scores are flexible so that users can add their own songs if they like; it will automatically include them in the system.
2) Next week is the last of the semester, and there really isn't too much left as far as the skeleton of the game goes. The flow of gamestates is in place and everything SEEMS to be functioning properly. The one tail end from a hard days work today is that I need to calculate the average score and accuracy for the profiles. This should take maybe a half an hour. Next week I may work on my formal DFA for the game.
3) It seems that I made it on schedule, and although the game is basic, all the functionality I wanted in my design document is there. There is a lot of room for features, primarily in stat keeping and profile comparison, but I believe the design of the program is flexible enough to allow such additions if I choose to. Although they are not priorities, I may add them if I get all the graphics and sound implemented, toward the end of next semester.
The only other thing I want to add is possibly a custom GUI and get rid of swing; this would certainly make it prettier and theres a possibility that I could reuse a lot of the listeners/ActionPerformed methods I already have.
2) Next week is the last of the semester, and there really isn't too much left as far as the skeleton of the game goes. The flow of gamestates is in place and everything SEEMS to be functioning properly. The one tail end from a hard days work today is that I need to calculate the average score and accuracy for the profiles. This should take maybe a half an hour. Next week I may work on my formal DFA for the game.
3) It seems that I made it on schedule, and although the game is basic, all the functionality I wanted in my design document is there. There is a lot of room for features, primarily in stat keeping and profile comparison, but I believe the design of the program is flexible enough to allow such additions if I choose to. Although they are not priorities, I may add them if I get all the graphics and sound implemented, toward the end of next semester.
The only other thing I want to add is possibly a custom GUI and get rid of swing; this would certainly make it prettier and theres a possibility that I could reuse a lot of the listeners/ActionPerformed methods I already have.
Wednesday, November 30, 2011
Wednesday Post 8
1) Lets look at the list I made for last week and see what I got done:
Scoring system
I implemented the scoring system, as described in the design document, but have not been able to test it yet. Next time I will test it with the game pad, which is why it resides in the "verify" column of the scrum board.
Investigation of skinnable swing elements
Custom LAF (look and feels) are surprisingly easy to integrate; just adding them to the classpath and a single call from the UIManager. However, for some reason the custom fonts are not working, so I have to investigate that further, which is now a task on the board.
High Scores/Profile integration
This part I started, but realized that I have no architecture for high scores besides the personal bests saved in the profile; these bests don't make sense either because they do not differentiate between difficulty levels. What I need to do is develop a completely new class that interfaces with the profile to not only record personal bests (on both difficulties) but allow comparison between other profiles and other bests. This will be the focus for next time.
Options Gamestate
I could not think of a single option that is absolutely necessary to the game, so I'm just skipping this for now.
Select level gamestate
I got this part all done except for displaying the personal bests, which is part of the problem from above. That's an easy fix though. Also, I can now select the difficulty levels.
2) Next week, I need to develop a new structure for high scores that make them easy to retrieve, sort, and compare. It will need to integrate with the profile. Along with this will be the end of song gamestate, which basically accumulates game data, calculates score, and reports it to the user and to the high score class.
If I have time, I need to write a python script to assist me in creating the song data files. The overall goal is to have a working example song by the end of the semester, with working profiles and high scores.
3) Nothing today.
Scoring system
I implemented the scoring system, as described in the design document, but have not been able to test it yet. Next time I will test it with the game pad, which is why it resides in the "verify" column of the scrum board.
Investigation of skinnable swing elements
Custom LAF (look and feels) are surprisingly easy to integrate; just adding them to the classpath and a single call from the UIManager. However, for some reason the custom fonts are not working, so I have to investigate that further, which is now a task on the board.
High Scores/Profile integration
This part I started, but realized that I have no architecture for high scores besides the personal bests saved in the profile; these bests don't make sense either because they do not differentiate between difficulty levels. What I need to do is develop a completely new class that interfaces with the profile to not only record personal bests (on both difficulties) but allow comparison between other profiles and other bests. This will be the focus for next time.
Options Gamestate
I could not think of a single option that is absolutely necessary to the game, so I'm just skipping this for now.
Select level gamestate
I got this part all done except for displaying the personal bests, which is part of the problem from above. That's an easy fix though. Also, I can now select the difficulty levels.
2) Next week, I need to develop a new structure for high scores that make them easy to retrieve, sort, and compare. It will need to integrate with the profile. Along with this will be the end of song gamestate, which basically accumulates game data, calculates score, and reports it to the user and to the high score class.
If I have time, I need to write a python script to assist me in creating the song data files. The overall goal is to have a working example song by the end of the semester, with working profiles and high scores.
3) Nothing today.
Wednesday, November 16, 2011
Wednesday Post 7
1) Today I worked on getting gamepad input to work, which was a lot easier than I thought it would be. I'm using a library called JXInput, which sadly is not cross platform. I went ahead and set up some dummy "slide positions" for my normal gamepad so I could detect successful notes. What I thought would be super difficult really wasn't, and now its just a matter of optimizing the code so that the input is as accurate as possible.
2) As the semester wanes, the goal is to get a lot of the functional elements of the game done, and next semester will be primarily graphics and sound. The main things I need to do are:
Scoring system
Investigation of skinnable swing elements
High Scores/Profile integration
Options Gamestate
Select level gamestate
Over Holiday break I plan to finish up on the controller and get that fully integrated. I believe I can finish up what I have here in the next 4 weeks.
3) At the beginning, when I was switching around with engines, I thought it was a giant waste of time. One good thing that came from it though was I learned how to integrate jar libraries into my classpath and netbeans project, something I had no idea how to do before the engine shuffle. Today, I think this (and a little bit of luck with the documentation) is what I credit the success of JXInput.
2) As the semester wanes, the goal is to get a lot of the functional elements of the game done, and next semester will be primarily graphics and sound. The main things I need to do are:
Scoring system
Investigation of skinnable swing elements
High Scores/Profile integration
Options Gamestate
Select level gamestate
Over Holiday break I plan to finish up on the controller and get that fully integrated. I believe I can finish up what I have here in the next 4 weeks.
3) At the beginning, when I was switching around with engines, I thought it was a giant waste of time. One good thing that came from it though was I learned how to integrate jar libraries into my classpath and netbeans project, something I had no idea how to do before the engine shuffle. Today, I think this (and a little bit of luck with the documentation) is what I credit the success of JXInput.
Wednesday, November 9, 2011
Wednesday Post 6
1) Today I made the progress bar, which proved to have its problems with the scaling. I also created a bitmap font class to create and display scalable bitmap fonts.
2) Next week I'm going to finish up the HUD, then I'll go on to getting joystick input.
3) Here is the bitmap font code :
2) Next week I'm going to finish up the HUD, then I'll go on to getting joystick input.
3) Here is the bitmap font code :
package seniorproj;
import java.util.HashMap;
import java.awt.image.*;
import java.awt.*;
public class BitmapFont {
private HashMap img_list;
private int cell_size;
public BitmapFont(int size, Color c){
img_list=new HashMap();
cell_size=size;
//numbers
for(int xx=48;xx<=57;xx++){
BufferedImage b = new BufferedImage(size,size*2,BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
Graphics2D g2 = b.createGraphics();
g2.setFont(new Font("Arial",0,size));
g2.setPaint(c);
g2.drawString(Character.toString((char)xx),size/2,size);
img_list.put(Character.toString((char)xx),b);
}
//uppercase
for(int xx=65;xx<=90;xx++){
BufferedImage b = new BufferedImage(size,size*2,BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
Graphics2D g2 = b.createGraphics();
g2.setFont(new Font("Arial",0,size));
g2.setPaint(c);
g2.drawString(Character.toString((char)xx),size/2,size);
img_list.put(Character.toString((char)xx),b);
}
//lowercase
for(int xx=97;xx<=122;xx++){
BufferedImage b = new BufferedImage(size,size*2,BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_ARGB);
Graphics2D g2 = b.createGraphics();
g2.setFont(new Font("Arial",0,size));
g2.setPaint(c);
g2.drawString(Character.toString((char)xx),size/2,size);
img_list.put(Character.toString((char)xx),b);
}
}
public void render_string(Graphics2D g2,int x, int y, String str, float rw, float rh){
for(int xx=0;xx
Wednesday, November 2, 2011
Wednesday Post 5
1) Today was a productive day, as I got the entire profile gamestate completed (add, remove, select), made the graphics scalable, and began working on the HUD. I also made a credits notification box, which took a single line of code.
2) Next week will be a 100% focus on the Play gamestate. I want to focus on designing the layout and basic look of the play field without getting hung up on graphics too much. The goals for the end of next week will be to have blobs moving, a basic backgroudn designed with the game in mind, and a hud containing score, multiplier, and a progress bar.
3) Came across my first bug today that I'm leaving in for now. It seems that when I clear the text area and then add text directly afterward, the window freezes. For now it just appends the text area with the profile information, which is good enough for now. I'm glad I let it go after working on it, so I could move on to more important things.
2) Next week will be a 100% focus on the Play gamestate. I want to focus on designing the layout and basic look of the play field without getting hung up on graphics too much. The goals for the end of next week will be to have blobs moving, a basic backgroudn designed with the game in mind, and a hud containing score, multiplier, and a progress bar.
3) Came across my first bug today that I'm leaving in for now. It seems that when I clear the text area and then add text directly afterward, the window freezes. For now it just appends the text area with the profile information, which is good enough for now. I'm glad I let it go after working on it, so I could move on to more important things.
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Wednesday Post 4
1) Today I started the profile class, which turned out to be very easy because the saving and loading is handled with Java's serializing. I then moved on to fix the menu bug, which I did after a while of playing around with layouts and NetBeans swing editor. It allows me to rapidly prototype and drag and drop elements. It took a while, because the default free form layout doesn't scale with the windows, which is something I want with this game. I ended up using a combination of Border and Grid layouts to get my desired look. After that, I started to work on the profile gamestate, getting the profiles loaded and into the JList element.
2) Next week I want to finish the profile gamestate completely and make all the drawn graphics scalable. If I have time, I'll start on the options gamestate.
3) Today I learned that although Java Swing layouts are cumbersome with code, they are a lot easier to work with using a visible GUI. I also learned that even through freeform seems to be the most flexible, it has numerous problems when working with a scalable window. It took a lot of trial and error but I'm proud to say that using a combination of the two I have a really rapid system of menu development. I anticipate that this will be extremely useful when doing the options, pause, and credits screen.
2) Next week I want to finish the profile gamestate completely and make all the drawn graphics scalable. If I have time, I'll start on the options gamestate.
3) Today I learned that although Java Swing layouts are cumbersome with code, they are a lot easier to work with using a visible GUI. I also learned that even through freeform seems to be the most flexible, it has numerous problems when working with a scalable window. It took a lot of trial and error but I'm proud to say that using a combination of the two I have a really rapid system of menu development. I anticipate that this will be extremely useful when doing the options, pause, and credits screen.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)