Vinyl, End of Semester

The Open House went incredibly well and we got a lot of really good feedback on the game.  It naturally demos very well since it's bright and loud so we always had people gathered around the TV for the duration of the open house.  Everyone who played the game seemed to really love it, which was awesome, and picked it up really quickly.

We still have quite a bit of polish to do next semester, but considering with how this semester went, I'm extremely happy with where the game has gotten to.

Vinyl, Pre-EAE Day!

This last week was the final build for Vinyl before we're going to be showing it off at EAE Day.  As such I worked on a bunch of small tasks we needed to get finished off for the demo, along with a more major feature of actually tying leaderboard functionality in since Cody finished the framework for it last week.  Now clicking on the Leaderboard button in the Song Selection screen causes the songs to vanish and most of the buttons as well and the scores for that song scroll upwards.  Additionally, once the player reaches the Stats Screen at the end of a song they find out where they placed and if they're in the top 10 they get the option to submit their score by entering their initials.

On top of that I added in the new artwork for the power meter, added a particle effect for when the player collides with an obstacle, and made it so that the particles on the new star filter stay inside of the star.  I also fixed two bugs: one was an issue with how sorting songs by high score was working, and the other was making it so that the particles that come out of the player while boosting or after hitting a filter come out of the board the player is on as opposed to their back.


Today I worked on another menu overhaul to get the newest version of the artwork into the game.  Everything is looking so much better now.

Vinyl, Post-Thanksgiving Update

Now that Thanksgiving is over it's time to cover the last two weeks since I fell behind on blogging again.  Last week was pretty uneventful since it was Thanksgiving, but I did do a complete overhaul on every single menu since we got the new artwork for them.  I think it really helps the game and looks so much better than what we had before.  My second task for the week, which I'm going to get done tomorrow, is to get the new filter object and its particle system in to replace the current one.  It should be relatively straight forward, but since we want a mesh with the particles contained inside of it I'm going to be figuring out how to do things with Unity's particle engine that I haven't done yet.  Should be fun.

The week before last I did a complete overhaul on all of the in-game UI since we got the artwork for that as well and it certainly looks much nicer, although I'm concerned that the power bar has lost a large chunk of its functionality since it's now harder to see in your peripheral vision.  Easy to fix at least, and not a huge concern.  I also started working on the new feature we added to the game that I mentioned last time to allow the player to change the audio effects of the song.  We're calling them Genre Changers and I got the spawning for them all set up so that they're showing up in game.  All that's left is to tie functionality into them once Sherly finishes that up on the audio side.

There's only two weeks left until the end of the semester and I'm starting to wonder if we're going to get all the coding done by that point.  It's looking like we might have a bit of crunching to do during Finals week.