WASD – Slowly Workin’ Away

               Another week has passed (where have the weeks gone?) and my game development group is slowly making some progress while trying to balance working on our game with our other piles of homework that we have to do. This week, I can’t say we’ve made a tremendous improvement, but we’ve certainly got the ball rolling a bit, since we’ve now been fixing up some of our old game code and even adding some new things.

               Personally, I have been working on developing a working loading screen for our game, though since our animator has been working on cutting down our raptor animations to far fewer frames than before, our loading times may decrease significantly and so there may be no need for a loading screen after all. For once, I’m hoping that our game will end up loading slower than expected just so that my work won’t be for nothing. However, I struggled for quite a while just trying to make our game render while loading in the first place, and even now that I’ve got that working, I’m still having some pretty strange issues. For one thing, the game stops after loading only 2 animations, and only resumes when you click or move the game window. That could be problematic. On top of that, a couple of 3D models are now causing the game to crash when they attempt to load, despite the fact that they worked fine before I tried implementing the loading screen. I’m still trying to solve these problems, but I’ve had to put this work on hold in order to tackle some other homework.

 Our artist's concept for the different raptor models

               Also, we have been collaborating to come up with some ideas for a menu visually. I may end up programming the menu myself once the graphics for it have been made, which our artist is currently up to. However, she is also tackling some concept art, including designs for additional raptors to be put in the game. Our animator has also been tweaking the animation system in programming, as well as organizing bits of code the best he can.

               Altogether, we’ve been working on a bit more than last week, and we’re quickly building a collection of concept art for our game, but it’s still nowhere near complete. Hopefully we can pick up the pace more with each week, until we have a polished game.