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.
Saturday, December 14, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 10, 2013
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.
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.
Sunday, December 1, 2013
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.
Sunday, November 17, 2013
Vinyl, Information Overload!
This last week my focus was to improve the flow of information to the player. This happened through two primary means: a new play screen, and a new stats screen.
Play screen:
Instead of the songs being listed on the main menu, they now have their own screen. This allowed for added information on the songs such as duration, difficulty, and high scores. Additionally, players can now sort the song list by any of these parameters making it much easier to find and compare songs.
(Note: This is actually the most recent version of the song selection screen. At the time of writing this blog it was just the inside song buttons and all the other buttons floating in blackness.)
Stats screen:
The stats screen shows up after the player finishes a song and contains the majority of the information dump. It displays the score the player got not he song in addition to the top 10 online high scores for that song. It also tells the player what their maximum streak was, how many obstacles they hit, and how many filters they collected. Finally, it also lets them know how many times they jumped and for how many seconds they used both boosting and scratching.
We also did a bit more designing on Vinyl this week to add in the ability for the player to select the music effect of the filters and the enhancements at the start of the song and at intervals throughout it. This allows the player a bit more agency in listening to their music while playing the game.
Play screen:
Instead of the songs being listed on the main menu, they now have their own screen. This allowed for added information on the songs such as duration, difficulty, and high scores. Additionally, players can now sort the song list by any of these parameters making it much easier to find and compare songs.
(Note: This is actually the most recent version of the song selection screen. At the time of writing this blog it was just the inside song buttons and all the other buttons floating in blackness.)
Stats screen:
The stats screen shows up after the player finishes a song and contains the majority of the information dump. It displays the score the player got not he song in addition to the top 10 online high scores for that song. It also tells the player what their maximum streak was, how many obstacles they hit, and how many filters they collected. Finally, it also lets them know how many times they jumped and for how many seconds they used both boosting and scratching.
We also did a bit more designing on Vinyl this week to add in the ability for the player to select the music effect of the filters and the enhancements at the start of the song and at intervals throughout it. This allows the player a bit more agency in listening to their music while playing the game.
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