Vinyl is done (actually has been for about a week now) and is scheduled to be published this Friday on Desura. It's a huge relief to be done, and it's also very rewarding. I'm looking forward to seeing some of the responses we get once the game goes live. I'll post a link here once it's available.
Link: http://www.desura.com/games/vinyl
All that's left now is to finish up the last little bit of work in my other classes and then graduation in a week.
And then getting a job hopefully.
Tuesday, April 22, 2014
Wednesday, March 12, 2014
Vinyl, Wrapping Up
There hasn't been too much to talk about regarding Vinyl over the past few months as we rush towards our publication date. We've largely been working on fixing bugs and resolving our various messaging issues. We just got the game up on Steam Greenlight for voting, hopefully it does well enough that we actually get to release there. That would be incredible.
Bug fixing has been going very well, we're down to the point where we have almost everything resolved and are trying our best to not make any drastic changes that might result in a whole slew of new bugs to fix. At this point, my primary concern is still messaging as it has been the largest thorn in our side or quite a while now. The in game UI is essentially finalized, we're just trying to figure out the best location on the screen for the energy bar so that the player can easily see it, without it being in the way of anything. I have concerns about our loading screen intro video meant to teach the player how to play the game. It's a vital part of our solution to most of our messaging issues and it's not in the sate I'd like it to be in. I'm sure it will be our primary focus once we get back from GDC next week.
GDC itself should be quite interesting. As opposed to last year I'm now looking for a job as opposed to an internship, and hopefully I manage to find something or at least make some connections. In any event, I'm sure it will be remarkably educational once again.
Bug fixing has been going very well, we're down to the point where we have almost everything resolved and are trying our best to not make any drastic changes that might result in a whole slew of new bugs to fix. At this point, my primary concern is still messaging as it has been the largest thorn in our side or quite a while now. The in game UI is essentially finalized, we're just trying to figure out the best location on the screen for the energy bar so that the player can easily see it, without it being in the way of anything. I have concerns about our loading screen intro video meant to teach the player how to play the game. It's a vital part of our solution to most of our messaging issues and it's not in the sate I'd like it to be in. I'm sure it will be our primary focus once we get back from GDC next week.
GDC itself should be quite interesting. As opposed to last year I'm now looking for a job as opposed to an internship, and hopefully I manage to find something or at least make some connections. In any event, I'm sure it will be remarkably educational once again.
Wednesday, January 22, 2014
Vinyl, Final Semester
There's lots of polishing to go, but Vinyl is in a really great state right now. Over the last two weeks since this semester started my continued focus has been to improve the menus since we've mostly got the gameplay locked down. Top priority has been getting animations into the menus, and we now have the Main Menu almost fully animated. It's incredible how much of a difference it makes. The Pause screen during gameplay is also looking great, but the Song Selection screen is in dire need of updating. I'm hoping to be able to complete that by the end of the week if we can get the rest of the assets.
I also worked on the leaderboards a bit more to ensure that if they do fail we're handling that in a good way so the game continues to run and the player is notified of the problem. We've also been reworking score mechanics trying to come up with a system that feels good and is as understandable to a player as it needs to be. A large part of this was changing how the filters impact score as they were previously far too large of an impact compared to everything else. Our new system simply activates a multiplier, which had the added benefit of us not needing to display as much text on the screen. A side effect of this, however, was that it became harder to tell if you'd managed to hit a filter after the first one or not. To address this, I added another particle effect that plays when you hit one to make it visually obvious.
I also worked on the leaderboards a bit more to ensure that if they do fail we're handling that in a good way so the game continues to run and the player is notified of the problem. We've also been reworking score mechanics trying to come up with a system that feels good and is as understandable to a player as it needs to be. A large part of this was changing how the filters impact score as they were previously far too large of an impact compared to everything else. Our new system simply activates a multiplier, which had the added benefit of us not needing to display as much text on the screen. A side effect of this, however, was that it became harder to tell if you'd managed to hit a filter after the first one or not. To address this, I added another particle effect that plays when you hit one to make it visually obvious.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)