Week 4 Dev. Post

This week Chris and I continued to work on implementing feature for the plant adventure game, this time getting the trees and seeds I had documented into the game. First we got the seeds to be on trees in limited quantities and then focusing on getting the game to be able to save these edited levels out to a text file so that the player could load up previously made levels. This allowed me to dive much deeper into the level and world design for the game, getting a feel for how large we wanted the maps to be. With this change of level size and scope we now needed a changing camera angle, which I initially prototyped and then polished up with Chris to make smoother and ready for testers that week.

I brought the game to QA to get feedback on the now intractable trees and seeds and camera rotation. They were received with mixed feedback, some not finding it terribly interesting and slightly piquing the interest of others. We knew we hadn’t hit the real experience for the game yet, as we weren’t exactly sure what we wanted that to be yet. We continued to bounce around this idea of farming and planting seeds at a base for the plant adventure game, but weren’t able to get further than that with how to go about it.

Week 3 Dev. Post

This week I focused heavily on the plant tile adventure game, still not having a better place-holder name for it at this point :3 This time I worked on getting some GUI in for the adventure game to serve as an inventory system. During this time I had a few work meetings with Chris to work on an experimental feature for the plant adventure prototype I had been focusing on, so that the game would automatically update the map as the player moved. It would load in chunks before hand and allow for much larger levels. However, this was an incredibly processor intensive task that contained a lot of risks, so we created a separate build entirely to protect the integrity of the other project.

I continued to work on documenting seed mechanic uses and started to implement them with Chris, we well as movement across differing levels of blocks in the level. Chris had created a beautiful level editor for me to utilize in creating levels as large as I deemed fit for the game. I was able to jump into that later in the week once he had created it.