Duncan Post 5/4/2017

This blog post will cover the work of the past 2 weeks plus one day from before I left for Washington DC. I have made a lot of progress in fixing bugs, and also developed two different bosses as well as the basis for the levels on which they can be fought. While working on both the bosses I made a health bar because they will have a lot more health than most of the enemies encountered in the game, previously it worked based on time and wasn't actually taking into account current health. Now it works exactly as a health bar should and reflects how much health they have left out of a total. It also disappears when the boss dies. One bug I fixed was where the bullets that I had fixed from shooting too far to the left last time was now making the bullets on the right shoot shorter distances, another was the inability of Pojo to respawn after dying to bosses which I fixed by condensing some of the code to the Controls class, something I will need to do a lot more of. Here is a picture of one of the bosses in action:

This bosses only current power is to move faster as he has less health, but he is very difficult to kill because of the moving platforms and his movement is circular so you cannot just spam bullets at him. I had some difficulty with the moving platforms at first because there is a bug where they can pull you along the ground so I had to move them all higher, Max will work on this bug. Moving forward I am going to work on condensing and commenting a lot of the code before we merge again, this upcoming will be the biggest merge yet and therefore very likely to result in a lot of bugs. I also fixed the longstanding bug on the previous boss where he would reflect the bullets into you but produce an error. I will also begin to work on level design and making arrays for the many parts of our code that will end up being a lot of if statements if not taken care of. Finally I am making another power for Abdul where he will be able to drop exploding bullets.

Tasks I completed:

• Make moving platforms move in a contiguous way
• Add moving platforms to boss level
• Make bar delete itself when enemy dies
• Give Abdul powers
• Upload to dropbox
• Start making Abdul
• Make more boss powers
• Make boss sprite requests
• Fix bug when boss gets shot that appears to do nothing

Active Tasks I hope to complete:

• Fix Unity
• Fix bug where Pojo is changing paintoffset when he jumps
• Make Another Boss Level 
• Start level design
• Make score class into array

Max Post for 5/4/2017

I spent almost all week working on our scoring system. I ran into a lot of problems with this, but this was mostly due to my lack of knowledge surrounding Unity. I found out a really great way to say integers to the disk, and I used this to check for highscores. Currently, this only works on level one. I wanted to condense code as much as possible, so I did not extend to other levels. I will once I think of a way to condense my if statements. If I did not do this, we would have 36 statements! I almost got this done this class, but I ran out of time. I will be working on finishing the scoring altogether this weekend, then I will go back to finishing levels!

I used this picture last week as a visual, but now it actually works with the code! This is the only visual thing I did this week. In addition, I emailed Noah about getting possible sprites for the game. So next week I should be implementing some of those.

Tasks I Completed This Week:

• Email Noah Sprite Requests
• Find star system tutorial (I marked this as complete, but I actually did it all myself. No good tutorials)
• Save highscore to disk using playerprefs
• Create visual aspect of scoring system
• Condense if statements in unlock script

Active Tasks I Hope to Complete:

• Finish star system
• Figure out how to loop through brushes in a concise way
• Extend scoring system to multiple levels
• Create level 2 in Unity

Once I can figure out a way to loop through the brushes (the gameobject that acts as "stars"), then the scoring will be done!