Accomplishments:
- Had a great meeting with the art team where we discussed many important things. (See the previous post to read the meeting minutes.) Justin and Kristen are taking a necessary break from the project in order to focus on a very important project at school, but I sincerely hope they'll be back in a few months. I need them!
- Started talking to a couple of candidates for voice-over work. I have tentative agreements with two of them, but the scripts and technical details still need to be worked out.
- Created MHFont class that encapsulates both normal fonts and image fonts, and treats them uniformly using the Strategy Pattern.
- As a result, MHGUIComponent subclass objects now display image fonts correctly, AND image fonts can now be used on buttons as well! Plus, all types of fonts can be scaled by percentage to make them larger or smaller, and the metrics calculate accordingly.
- Got the medium buttons into the UI factory and added them to several screens. Decided to call them "small buttons" instead since they ended up being really tiny. But that'll be good when I use them to control the game HUD.
- The standalone server app no longer treats the user as a player instead of a spectator.
- Spectator modes no longer have a team setup screen.
- They do, however, have an "Upgrade Team" button on the lobby screen which should not be there.
- Finished the Recruit menu! If I may say so...WOOHOO! Perhaps it should contain a legend to explain what those two-letter stat abbreviations are about.
Known Issues:
- When a player drops off, their team data is orphaned. The server needs to recognize this and place the orphaned team under AI control.
- Spectator modes should not have an "Upgrade Team" button on their lobby screen. The only button they should have is "Exit" because that is the only thing they are allowed to do other than wait for the players to be ready.
- The server pays no attention to the number of teams selected on the Game Setup screen. Before going into the game state, after all human players have signaled ready, the server needs to compare the number of current players with the max number of teams selected by the host, and then fill in missing teams with AI opponents.
- Some of the UI components on the standalone server app don't render properly. Their alignment is off.
Next Steps:
High Priority:
- Finish creating the Android Nation and Alpha Male Modern fonts.
- Add a legend to the Recruit menu to explain the abbreviations in the column headings. Or better yet, help text in a dialog box accessed by a Help button.
- Finish the team configuration screen.
- Include a small chat client so players can talk while getting ready for the next match.
- Create the character configuration screen.
Medium Priority:
- Create isometric wall tile converter.
- Create utility for exporting converted iso tiles to PNG files.
- Necessary for the "floor tiles in the obstacle layer" optimization.
- Finish asset lists for current set of level designs.
- Evaluate and analyze Sarah's level designs, too.
- Finish the lobby screen.
- Add "Exit" and "Signal Ready" buttons.
- Remove the "Upgrade Team" button from the spectators' lobby.
- Create a display for player name, team name, and team color.
- Enhance client list display to show team colors and user roles.
- Finish the team creation screen.
- Redo the UI with custom components.
- Put in the floor image for the captains to stand on.
- Fix the UI in the standalone server app.
Low Priority:
- Tack on Help buttons to more components and screens.
- In the standalone server app, the game setup screen should have an "AI Only" button that launches the game with no human players. It should also have buttons for displaying team, character, and user data.
- Create command line interface for server app so it can be launched and configured remotely.
- Lay out the HUD.
- Consider designs for an effective test level. The existing designs will probably do, but we need a lot more of them anyway.
- Finish the level design guide.
- Design the TLC web site.
No comments:
Post a Comment