Hard to believe we’re just about halfway there! It’s easy to see that the game is starting to shapeup. Here’s what I did this past sprint:

This week on re[Mod], we saw a lot of improved player feedback, some new features, and more refactoring of the network code!

Improved Feedback

This was something primarily handled by our other programmer, Justin. We’ve included screenshake when the player is injured, improved reticle response when dealing damage, and an improved hitmarker when being hit. I also worked with Charlie, our Lead Designer, on implementing better audio feedback for all of these events as well. This tied well into the “bullet refactor” performed last week.

This week saw some new progression in re[Mod], but it also saw me come down with the flu, so my contributions this past week haven’t been quite as large as I would have hoped.

Redoing the Sniper Scope

There were some important improvements made, the first of which being that the sniper scope “aim-down-sights” effect was rewritten to use a screen overlay instead of the mediocre “move the gun to the center of the screen” that we were doing before. Initially, my plan was to essentially use a switch inside the WeaponPartScope script which would cover the different effect types, but I quickly found that that was not flexible enough, as different effect types would require different types of data and exposed variables.

Weekly State of the Repo

The mid-year show and final presentations are coming up quick! It’s hard to believe, but we’re just under two weeks away from finding out if re[Mod] gets to go on to next semester!

Since we’re getting so close to the end, we’ve been settling into a slow code-freeze, and the number of new features we’ve selected for the past few sprints has gotten smaller and smaller as the deadline approaches. There is still plenty in our backlog should we go on to the next semester, but that hasn’t stopped us from adding a few cool new things. This week, we’ll be challenging Vertical Slice to get into Final Iteration, which means we’re guaranteed to present at the mid-year show; we’ve also already started that presentation as well. But let’s look at what’s new in the game this week!

Weekly State of the Repo

Weekly State of the Repo

During our last class, we successfully challenged Initial Concepts and are thus now in the Deep Dive stage! Of our three prototypes, we decided to move forward with the Arena game, with one important change: QA feedback was nearly unanimous that the splitscreen controller-based version was not cutting it for players. Thus, the first thing we did this sprint was one of the biggest challenges we’ve faced as a team yet: networking the game.

We’ve also finally decided on a placeholder project/code name: Modulate.