Progress update for 7/14/12 - 7/20/12

This week:

After recovering from jetlag I made a lot of good progress on the game this week.

1. I reworked my level design for our Alan Moore tutorial level for the new aspect ratio and created all the geometry in the level editor.
2. I also added a respawn mechanism, so now when you die you don't have to use debug commands to return to life. This somehow came out of me fixing a bug that played the player death sound every frame when you passed a certain Y value in world space.
3. My roommate added a volume parameter so that what sound effects we do have aren't blasting our ear drums out every time we boot the game.
4. My roommate added the structure for scoring in the game and set up the beginnings of saving and loading games.
5. Alan Moore now talks to you throughout the tutorial level.

I'm not entirely convinced we needed a score system, but I guess it doesn't hurt to have one and I suspect that leaderboards are a requirement (or at least a boon) when it comes to Microsoft certification.

We also hit a soft feature lock today on the project. We won't be adding any more new features unless we absolutely cannot help it. We'll be spending enough time fixing bugs we find and designing around the mechanics we have now.

Here's the start of Alan Moore's level. The whole thing has been redesigned from the ground up to better teach you the game. Unfortunately, I'm not the best level designer, so it probably needs a lot of work but for now I'm blissfully unaware of how bad it is. It also handles some exposition by having Alan Moore talk to you throughout the level.

This level has a gimmick. The gimmick being that you can jump on Alan Moore's speech bubbles and use them to continue through the level. You may recall earlier when I said I was not the best level designer?

Here you can see the level select screen that my roommate has made. He spent a whole lot of time getting that Alan Moore picture just right. Not helpful in and of itself, but man is it cool.