Trade Show & It's all over!

Project has finally come to an end, and after an awesome Trade Show in which we jointly won the Best Project at the Trade Show 2011, it's all over! We're very happy with what we produced, which met all our initial expectations and all went to plan. We've all learned a lot in the process, in the fields of coding, game design, teamwork, organisational skills and computer science project development cycles.

That's Just... Low!

COM/AI reaches an all-time high (correctly using moves corresponding to your hitbox including knocked down) and an all-time low (kicking you while you're down) in the same revision.

Move ranges, effects, polish

More stuff tonight... a slow-down effect when you KO the other player, some small bugfixes, some small improvements to the game and to the animation, another small piece of music, and "Move Hit Ranges". Now instead of a move having only a set instant where it "hits" and if it isn't it range then the move is discarded, moves have a time window where the move can potentially hit. This was made for, especially, Takeshi's flying kick where any time he is flying in the air is a potential hit, not just one particular moment in the air.

Moves such as Takeshi's flying kick didn't have a specific
instant of time that the move connected.

Polish-wise, I've just implemented various all-around improvements like removing the "Round 1" announcement from training mode, not allowing you to choose AI for story mode, and that sort of thing.

I've also tinkered with the AI/COM and am glad to say it plays a lot better now. It's more fun to watch and makes for more exciting demos. I did discover one bug which made it impossible for AI/COMs to do crouching moves (even though there are only two.) The subsequent fixing of this bug and a few other bugs which affected blocking, introduced by the new HitBox type "Lowest" (which can also hit downed fighters, unlike "Low",) and a bit of tweaking, was vital to this improvement.

Final touches.

I'm glad to say that this week, in the coming days before the trade show, we have only the final touches to put on Project Sensei-now I'm doing nice things like making the demo mode loop, making additional sound effects and polishing up some of the graphics, making small changes to how the game looks--just details here and there. Probably some time tonight I'll start working a bit more on polishing the AI/COM behaviour, as it just needs a little tweaking to give a more exciting and natural performance for demonstration purposes.

Interfaces, menus, physics fixes, polish

Last night for about 4 hours I worked on completing the menus, in particular the in-game pause menu which needed a new submenu "COM Customisation". I also added varies elements to the existing UI to polish it. For example, the credits screen now says (B) Back in the corner, and blank black backgrounds in two of the screens have been replaced with a dark grey scrolling plasma pattern.

This morning I did a few major fixes to a couple of small bugs in the event manager related to physics. One such bug was that move-related inertia was being inverted entirely where only the X component of the 2D vector should have been inverted. Another bug was using the inertia value before clamping it, resulting in the full inertia for one frame then the clamped inertia from then on (imagine teleportation.) This bug was only noticeable with move inertia significantly greater than the clamping threshold (10).

Now we can do proper flying punches and kicks in our combos without teleporting.

OneClick Installation

After about an hours worth of debugging and getting this OneClick installation to gather all the right dependencies and figure out why it wanted to load things that didn't exist (but once did) and forget to create some folders (guess since there was nothing in there...) I finally have a working Windows Binary installer setup binary for Sensei. This is a good milestone.

More polish work

Tonight in the last hour I've put together the new in-game paused menu with a brand new volume slider bar. I've also touched up some of the intro screens and I plan to polish up a few of the other UI screens now.

Shiny. Das ist gut.

Helpful instructions and a clean interface.

And now, inexplicably, it's grey and ripply. Yay