Vinyl, Tweaks and Fixes

Since the IGF submission is coming up in just a week we spent this week focusing on fine tuning and polishing what we have with minimal addition of anything new.  I spent most of my time continuing to work on the menus to make them look better.  Additionally I spent some more time working with the filters on both their position as well as their appearance.  Working together with Zeph we've created a great 8th note filter that really looks awesome.

My addition to the game this week was implementing the streak counter so that it wasn't just a string on the screen.  We have some initial artwork for it and it shows up every 25 streak or when you lose your current streak.  Since implementing this I've decided to change it so that the streak always shows off to the side of the screen and the pop ups will show still in the middle.  This makes it so people can always see what their streak is, while still notifying them clearly of bigger milestones.

Vinyl, Last 3 Weeks

Last week was more of a team building week than progress on the game since we were pretty fragmented and still all over the place.  We've definitely fixed most of the problems, but I feel like there's still a few that need to be addressed.  Hopefully we can take care of those once everyone is back from Fall Break.

Speaking of Fall Break it's been very productive.  This week I've:

• Implemented the Main Menu, About Screen, "Loading" Screen, Pause Screen, and set up the framework for the Options Menu.
• Implemented the varying filter effects so that the more in a row you hit the stronger the effect becomes.
• Changed the way filter spawning works so that you have to work a bit to collect them.
• Made it so that when you scratch the filters (and particle effect) will be properly tracked.
• Added a new particle effect for when the player uses the boost.

The menus was easily the most time consuming, but I'm also very proud of them.  Especially the changes I made to the song selection list so that it fits with the theme of the game incredibly nicely (if I do say so myself).

No song selected:

 Song selected:

The rest of the changes were all smaller and just to get things that were already working to work better.  Most of them were new exposure to code I hadn't worked with before though, so that was really nice to learn about how we're doing other aspects of the code.

Vinyl, Menus!

This week on Vinyl my main focus was to start getting our menus to a more finished state.  As a result, I added a new scrolling window to hold all of the songs a user imports as opposed to the simple list we had before (which meant you could only have about 20 songs loaded).  I also added functionality so that the user can remove a song from the game's list which also deletes the files the game makes to run with.  This was actually slightly more challenging than I thought it would be just because of the way Unity handles scrolling windows and selection.  The way it's set up now works perfectly, but it does feel slightly hack-y although I can't think of any other way to do it.

On top of that I also made it so that when you finish a level, instead of just sitting there not knowing what to do (end the game) it returns you back to the song selection screen so that you can continue to play.  This should really help with playtesting since people haven't known what to do when they finish a song.

Lastly, I also worked with jumping a bit to give it the "Mario Effect".  This means that if you hit jump a little late, the jump will still go off, just like Mario can jump even after he runs off the edge.  This helped to make jumping feel more responsive and you never feel like a jump fails when it should have gone off anymore.