Week Two

With a basic (VERY basic) understanding of MOAI, programming for the game has begun.  My first assignment was to get the ingredients moving across the screen which was relatively easy to accomplish.  From there I found that I needed to make the ingredients disappear when they reached the left side of the screen.  In the end, a large portion of this initial code was modified to work with the collision code that came afterwords as my next project.

Collision was much more challenging to get up and running.  In the end, the tutorials recommended Block thread method was causing issues with getting collision code to work, so I ended up stripping it out and replacing it.  From there the process simplified greatly.  The game loop has a frame tracker method I built and inside of that (since it's a location of code we know is constantly being updated) is where I placed the collision logic.

With this done combined with the work of the rest of the team we -should- have a working prototype of the game once we combine all of the code.  Here's to hoping it works that smoothly!

Day 1

Our first game project is to make a game about, of all things, cheese!  While I initially drew a complete blank (Cheese RPG?) I came up with an initial idea I really liked.  Thinking of a food based game brought me back to Harvest Moon 64 since it's a game I played a lot of and really enjoyed.  Of course, since we're aiming for an iOS device something along the lines of Harvest Moon seems a little too complicated.  Besides the farming in HM64 there's also gathering of ingredients in the wild and this seemed like a good approach.  Our game could have a randomly generated field of ingredients and the player would have a time limit to run around gathering what they want.

From here we need to do something with our ingredients to actually make the cheese, a crafting system.  I instantly thought of the new crafting system of Guild Wars 2.  By starting with the base cheese, Promontory, players could try experimenting with the ingredients they'd gathered to figure out the recipes for the other cheeses.  For instance adding coffee and lavender would create Barely Buzzed.

The main issue with this plan was that there aren't really that many different types of Beehive Cheese which severely limits this entire idea.

In the end, after a lot of group brainstorming, we came up with a completely different game that I actually like more than my initial game.  Our current plan is as follows:

We moved to a launch based game since it's very easy to use on an iOS device.  Thanks to our theme we knew we wanted a queen bee ordering a worker bee to fire our "cannon" which in this case is a beehive.  Our "cannonball" is a cheese wheel of Promontory.  Each launch will have a goal of target ingredients to crash the cheese wheel into such as 10 coffee and 5 lavender to make Barely Buzzed.  To offer some amount of control over the cheese wheel we have a bee on top carrying it and by touching the screen he'll lift it up for as long as you touch or until his fatigue bar fills up.  Fatigue will slowly regenerate when the screen isn't being touched.  To deal with ground collisions hitting a cow (which will randomly be around) will cause the cheese to bounce back up into the air.  Hitting the ground, however, gets he cheese dirty and ends the round in failure.  If the player manages to collect all the ingredients in the goal they create the target cheese and win the round moving on to the next cheese.

All in all I think things are looking really good and we should be able to get a demo of this up and running in our 4 week time period.  At this point we just have to figure out how to get Moai working....