Level 4

Here is some concept art for level 4. As you can see, our level design is completely original. Now Edward must make his way through Jake's castle to his sweetheart Bella. But not if Jake has anything to say about it. Jake eagerly awaits Edward's arrival by Bella's prison, ruing over his past defeats. This time, he will not be beaten so easily.

We also finished adding all of the game's cutscenes. Level 3 now has enemies, too! All that remains is to implement Edward and Jake's special attacks for level 3 and 4, and further level polishing. The rough outline of levels 2, 3, and 4 is now in-game, but we are not satisfied with their difficulty and flow. We plan to use the next two weeks to implement the few remaining features, fix bugs, and balance gameplay.

We are all very happy with our progress. As of writing this blog entry, we have a full game. All of the general structure (levels, fights, etc.) have been implemented already. Players can now play the game from start to finish, and witness first hand this epic saga of love and vampiracy.

Cutscenes and Level 3

We're quickly approaching the end of the semester, and it's high time we got an important aspect of the game implemented--cutscenes. We have found that without cutscenes even people who have been around our game since the beginning don't understand what's going on! This week we did the opening cutscene. In it, Bella is kidnapped by Jake while Edward is in class. Now Edward must escape to the forest where Jake's werewolf henchmen are waiting.

We hope that the silliness of the game is made more apparent with this new cinematic. Previously our game has been misinterpreted as serious. Hopefully now players will see a distinct theme as they play through our game.

We also started on Level 3. Level 3 is based on a city in Italy. Edward must traverse rooftops in pursuit of his love. This level will stress jumping more than previously. If you miss a jump between some rooftops, you fall to your sparkling death. This level may not be as polished as we like because we are focusing on getting the cutscene in.

Let the Fight Begin!

We are currently working on implementing our first epic boss encounterbetween Edward and Jake! After completing the second level, there will be atransition into an area specifically designed for the fight and our mainantagonist will be there waiting for you. The fight will be broken down intotwo phases, Jake in his human form and in his werewolf form. The switch willoccur after you have damaged Jake a certain amount. It should be achallenging and exciting experience.

On a different note, we are still working on adding in features to ourexisting levels and making some touch ups. Such as going back into level oneand adding the correct enemy, the brutish jock who terrorizes every highschool hallway. As for level two, we've added in our standard health pack forthe game, a cute and cuddly baby deer. It just warms your heart to see Edwardcradle that adorable little guy as he drinks his blood. We will have moreinteresting features to add in soon enough that should really enhance thegame play, dare i say sparkling?

-Alex (posted by James)

Welcome to the Opera

This week we prepared a feast for your ears. We added tons of sound effects for damage and attacks by player and enemy. We added new tracks for high score and menu. We updated the track for level 1's background music. The overall effect of all this is that you can play this game with your monitor turned off and its still fun.

We also added a 2nd level and a soundtrack for the 2nd level. The setting for the 2nd level is in the woods, the platforms include trees with branches at varied heights and turtles. It's a veritable adventure.

We Have A Game

We now how a playable game. Gameplay consists of getting from Edward's classroom to the school exit by jumping on platforms and battling enemies. This week we worked on bugs so that the game could be more polished. We managed to eliminate all of the bugs that we created the week prior from retrofitting our code to be more object-oriented. Our game now consists of clearly defined states and substates. For example, at any given time the game is in a state based on what level it is in (or if it is at the menu screen) and every enemy and player has a substate which specifies what attack they are performing.

There are 9 substates:

• Still
• Jump
• Run
• StillAttack
• JumpAttack
• RunAttack
• StillDamaged
• JumpDamaged
• RunDamaged

When a player or enemy is in a "Damaged" state, they take damage and flash for a half of a second. If the player takes too much damage, it exits to the menu screen. If an enemy takes too much damage from Edward's slap (which is his one Attack state at the moment) they fall to the ground then disappear.

The level editor can be accessed at:
http://www.tstechonline.com/edward/tiles/EdwardLevelEditor.html

Entire levels can be designed, from placing the background tiles to placing the platforms! You can also load levels to edit ones that you have already made. Still left undone: placing state locations of enemies and players and triggers.

Level One

Here is an image that gives you an idea of what level one looks like. The black spots are replaced by platforms in the actual game. This image doesn't show enemies or floating platforms.

Spring Break WOOHOO!

Progress this week:

This week we completed level 1, the high school. There are two types of enemies, death pits and wolfmen. The wolfmen have random movement (2D) and death pits are those ever so dangerous holes in the floor of the high school. The high school appropriately has techno music playing over its audio system the whole time.

We spent a large amount of time working on game play mechanics. Although we did not add a lot of functionality this week, we completely reworked our framework so that adding more functionality is easy and modular. We did add in our first attack, a slap, which will kill a wolfman within 50 pixels of Ed's hand. The slap comes with a nice sound effect. We also added an improved damage animation that can be done on the ground, while running, and while jumping. The hp indicator is now on a top layer and typed in red so that the player can easily view his hp.

Overall Progress:

So to summarize, we now have a completed 1st level of our game. There are some bugs we need to work out, but all of the framework is there and the game is definitely playable and enjoyable now. We are getting closer and closer to the stage when all we do is churn out more content.

Looking Forward:

Our immediate goal is to fix the parts of the 1st level that aren't perfect because we believe the quality of the game is more important than the quantity of gameplay. However, after finishing that we aim to add more attacks for Edward and make more enemies who are also more sophisticated. Due to our improved Character framework, after working out bugs this process should be relatively straightforward. Then we will look towards the artistic side of our game by adding cut scenes and voice overs.