Progress update 8/11/12 - 8/17/12

This week:

1. I spent some time writing a simple blackjack game for the Petit Computer app on my 3DS. It isn't done, but it was a nice distraction.
2. I spent some time watching panels from QuakeCon and some other talks about game development. July was all about rushing to get something done as quickly as possible, but now that it's over I want to devote some time to trying to prevent myself from mistakes.
3. I fixed the bug that causes you to fly speeding through the floor whenever you get take damage from something when you're in the air. Though ultimately unrelated to the collision handling subroutines, I've already begun rewriting them. The next step in this process will be to determine whether my old subroutines are fine as is or if I should finish rewriting them.

No screenshots this week. Lots more time was spent playing videogames again, something I didn't really get to do in July and haven't really done since May. It's been lovely to remember how much fun games can be and how much I like to just sit down and play one sometimes. The first level is still on track for a public release at the end of the month, so I'll just focus on getting it as polished as possible for that time.

Progress Update 8/4/2012 - 8/10/2012

This week:

1. Worked on a prototype for a different sort of game in XNA. Probably won't keep it in XNA, and might not go much further with it. Who knows right now.
2. Fixed a bug or two in Balzac, but not enough to warrant demo release.
3. Waited anxiously for feedback from judges in last month's contest and recieved none.
4. Reorganized TODO list for Balzac and thought about what needs to be done going forward.

Despite still feeling kinda burnt out from all the work I poured into the previous month and the release of new videogames that I love to play, I'm trying to get back into the swing of things and do something related to my game project each day. I thought that this past week would be more productive, but I guess I burned out last month a bit more than I was expecting. Anyways, the plan going forward is still to fix bugs and some art assets to make the demo more presentable, and then release it. My revised estimate/personal deadline for releasing the demo will be September 1st, which is a Saturday. Come what may, I'll release it that day and start asking for feedback. Maybe after I get some more feedback, I can get back into a position where I'm making visible changes each week!

Progress update for 7/28/12 - 8/3/12

This week:

Coming back from my last vacation for the month, I crammed a lot of work into the last two days of the competition (the 30th and 31st). Below is a short list of things that got done:

1. Created a bad, but topical, main menu screen.
2. Created new enemies: Squid and Miniboss Squid
3. My roommate added behavior for the BallRusher enemy and I ended up tweaking it a bit
4. I also leveraged existing logic into getting the Squid and Miniboss Squid some AI patterns. They aren't great, but they'll do.
5. Added more enemy placement throughout the level
6. Wrote entirely new logic for Squid enemies, the miniboss can deal with having the old logic.
7. Fixed some miscellaneous bugs relating to animation and enemies facing the right direction.
8. Added some music that I got from www.freemusicarchive.org
9. Added support for respawn points.
10. About an hour and a half before the deadline, I started adding the boss battle for our only level.
11. My roommate added a credits screen.
12. I added a fireball sprite for the boss
13. Added the music attributions to the credit screen 
14. Slapped together the entry form for our game and submitted it with about ten minutes to spare.
15. Submitted a patch the next morning because it turns out in my exhausted rush to get this done, I fucked up something simple with the respawn support, so you could crash the game by dying in the first 5 screens.

So the game is in a good state now, but I'm totally wiped out from the constant "go go go" of the contest, so I'm relaxing a bit for a few days and prototyping a different game before I continue work on Balzac. What will likely happen is this coming week I'll spend my time polishing and fixing bugs that I saw but didn't have time to deal with in July and then I'll release the first level as a sort of demo for the game. Hopefully that will make up for the lack of screenshots this week.