Emo Elmo

Hmm ... new ... Not much is going on. Red moved in today. I totally get to loot his movie collection when I'm bored. Brown is going to wait until Monday, I guess. So our living room is going to be pretty crowded. I'm storing some of their boxes in my bedroom (since I have so much friggin' room).

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I suppose I could make a somewhat detailed list of what all has been accomplished with our game. So ... in order of the appearance in the game:

- Studio splash screen (we load all our assets during this phase, so there's "no" load time)
- Team splash screen (pff, skip it. It's just a placeholder image anyway.)
- Title menu ("Play Game", "Options", "Credits", "Exit")
- Background music (does sound "appear"?)
- Mouse and keyboard can choose menu item
- Sound effects when a menu item is pressed (sfx have to be in .mp3 format)
- Exit will properly exit game (ESC is a quick key)
- Credits menu (displays a placeholder image)
- Options menu ("Sound Effects Volume" (mci doesn't support volume control for .wav format), "Music Volume", "Gamma" (brightness), "Controls" (can totally break the game by binding all the commands to one key))
- Play Game will actually reset the level (as opposed to just returning to where you left off)
- Introduction Cutscene (doesn't start immediately, but it will soon)
... (ignoring what appears in the cut-scene) ...
- HeadsUpDisplay elements (player health, score, paperclip count)
- HUD also disappears after time (slowly fades for 3 seconds)
- Humanoid player mesh & animations (walk/run, jump, fall, knocked back) (we still need attack and push/pull)
- Plane mesh & movement (the plane banks when it turns ... assuming bank is the word I'm looking for)
- Frog movement? (really just the player with an increased jump height at the moment)
- Classroom meshes (desk, walls, floor, ceiling, book, ruler)
- Ground collision (works most of the time ...)
- Object collision (what we're having trouble on ... kinda works, but I broke it again)
- Level design is such to need transformations (floating book requires frog form to get to (you start off with all forms at the moment), will add another floating book that requires plane form to get to)
- Eraser Nub minions (meshes, animations, most logic (we need to also do ground collision for them, since they can walk off desks w/o falling right now))
- Player-to-Enemy collisions (eraser nub can do a double attack because of his animation ... sucks to be the player)
- HUD actually changes based on outcome of collision (cause it could not work)
- Player-to-Stuff collisions (can pick up paperclips & healthpacks)
- Particle Effect (flashy stuff so you know you gained health ... not working in my version, but Brown has the fix)
- Sound Effect (at least there should be a sound effect when you pick up the healthpack ... the code supports it, then again, there should probably be sound effects when you jump and attack ...)
- Gum Monster boss (his model is totally a scoop of strawberry ice cream ... he jumps at the player, get stuck on the desk a little while (attack now!), and leaves a sticky residue on the desk (ew) whice slows the player (no, it's not white ... it's pink) ... though I think he can kill the player in one hit (not good))
- Pause menu (like the option menu, but also has a "Resume" button)

Hmm ... I don't know if I should add "Toon Shading" up there. It's kinda working, but I don't have it in my build yet. Nor do I know if it'll work well enough for our Alpha build. It probably will, but Brown's having trouble with it right now. So ... what's left to complete:

- Object Collision (stupid sphere-to-triangle detection)
- Toon Shading (stupid I-Don't-Know detection)
- Slash boss (oh no! Scissors!)
- Staple Remover minion (best enemy ever)
- End condition (whether you won or lost, we need something. Prolly end up with a high score table. Those are so easy.)
- Optimizing resources (we may be loading duplicate models & textures, thus wasting memory)
- Installer (apparently we need one)
- PowerPoint Presentations (*sigh* nothing is ever good enough)
- Animation triggers for the cut-scene manager (I totally ditched this on Green. It has something to do with getting a character to animate during a cut-scene. You know, like have the Gum Monster jump onto a paperclip at a given time. I'm thinking these events should be written in their own functions, since the cut-scene "script" doesn't support them, but would easily support taking a name of a function to call (or at least I think it'd be easier to implement than non-functions))
- Camera collisions (so the player is not hidden behind an object ... making objects transparent could also work, but probably takes more effort)
- Player pushing/pulling (I was waiting for object collision to finish, but I think we'll be using a different collision detection system (one that doesn't suck), like the one used for player-to-stuff collisions. Since the pushable stuff won't be big enough to need sphere-to-triangle)
- Player attacking animation (yeah ... right now you "punch" so fast you don't see it ... I think Will Smith did something like that in Ali)
- Paperclip & Healthpack models (Brown is currently working on them ... and Toon Shading)
- Complete Level design (well, it's designed, but we need to set it up ... and get assets. This probably involves a lot more that we think, just because of the variety of objects to be found in our classroom.)

Yeah ... that about does it. I'm gonna try hard to complete my stuff tomorrow, so I don't have to worry about it later. The end state should take me an hour or two. Two or three for pushing/pulling. One for camera collision. Infinity for player-to-object. We'll care about level design later. We'll probably also polish the menus. They're pretty bland at the moment.

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I got a package from The Casa. Yeah ... some of these may have been important five months ago. Though I'm not sure I have to file my school tuition with the IRS ... *gulp*. And if you've heard of the whole "Veterans Affairs Laptop Stolen" ordeal ... apparently I qualify as a VA for having my identity stolen. Though they don't have any evidence that *my* identity has been misused or that *my* name is even on the list, there are a lot of names, socials, and birth dates (24.5 million or so) on that laptop. *sigh* I'll have to get a credit report one of these days.

But good to know that Nurse Mom is still alive ... seeing as how she hasn't updated her blog in forevers. *shakes fist* ;)

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I totally neglected to clean the apartment today. I'll probably lazy out of it until the last moment on Tuesday.

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Those Kevin Smith tickets I mentioned a while back: Chill got one. I guess they were open to Film students on Friday and everyone else on Saturday. Darn.

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Oh ... so about that Gum Monster. (Sidetrack a bit first.) We had kinda intended to make a game for college or post-college males. Since the average gamer is 30+ (supposedly), it'd make for a nice target audience. However, we apparently couldn't justify being in a college classroom, since classrooms would more likely appeal to a younger audience (thus we're now aiming for fifth grade ... or something). Anyway, with the original idea, the game title would be "College Ruled" (cause, you know, college ruled paper). Best title ever. And with a college audience, we could get away with the phrase, "Gum on your face, Bill." Ha ha ha. Best line ever. Yeah ... I thought you should know.