MOJO was awesome!

So this week we had the MOJO event where we were able to showcase our game to all the interested enough to come and play it! I have to say it was an awesome experience and even though what we achieved until now was not perfect and had it's fair share of problems, it still managed to take out some reactions that we wished to achieve from the very beginning. The fact that we made these reactions pop out from people with our love and dedication for gaming and game development is what I, personally, wanted to do for a long time and ended up learning a lot about what I should do for a game in order to make it better. All in all I learned a lot about game development over the course of this.

We thank everyone that supported us, the teachers, IST and miniclip, as well as those that had the interest to try out our game, we hope that in a near future we will have this game finished and polished and that those that follow us will be there to try it then.

See ya soon!

MOJO experience

Today is my final post at this blog. It was a long road to reach the final development of Hero of Light but we reached it.

 The MOJO event was a great experience, there were a lot of people that wanted to play our game even with some minor bugs present in it. Some of those participants played more than half an hour, which I wasn't expecting at all! Also we received a lot of feedback of our professors and participants, that will help us improve our game, and taught us important lessons that will be useful to our professional work.

Reaching the end of this post I want to give a big thank you to all the people that helped us in the development of our game, such as our Focus Group, our Professors, Miniclip and the participants of the MOJO event.

See you next time!

Mojo!

Hey!

Time flew rigth by at mojo! It was a great event and I only wish i could have stayed longer (had some evaluations in Alameda during the afternoon). The start was a bit shaky as we were still setting some things up (unfortunately we were evaluated by the teachers at the start) but after we smoothed the testing process out, everything started going really well and the feedback was awesome! 

I also went around a few booths and tested some other games and found out that the average game quality was pretty good at the event wich is great.

For MDJ course, now its time to gather all our work and finish the final reports, but for hero of light, who knows what the future will hold.

Our poster in all it's glory

PS: We also got featured in this exame informatica's report but, unfortunately, I didn't get any cred as I wans't there so they forgot about me. :<

 http://exameinformatica.sapo.pt/noticias/software/2016-05-25-Eles-criam-jogos.-Mas-nao-brincam

Mojo sprint v2.0

Hey!

We're still working hard to have everything ready for MOJO.

There's only a few details missing from achieving what we set out to do but we won't be able to use a tutorial level due to lack of time. We'll compesate by having detaileds intructions on paper.

Also, here's our logo:

See you at MOJO!

Time to spice things up!

Just one more week until the MOJO event, so we expect to have everything up and running until then, and we plan on polishing as much as we can visually if we do have the time. For now we're making the final touches on the game, making 3 more types of enemies, special tiles working, menu and upgrades, of which 1 is already done, and 2 are half way done.
See you at MOJO!

Cocos Development week 8

Hello there!

We're reaching the final steps of the development of Hero of Light. Our game can now run multiple levels, with multiple enemies with all the tiles working. During this weekend we will finish some enemy behaviour and add some power upgrades to our hero.

See you in MOJO!

Optimizing our code!

This week has been a little slow but still refactoring is finally complete and multiple enemies now roam our map, I am now debugging the powers, and making the UI a bit more attractive while increasing visual feedback for the player, which include cancel sprites for all the powers, and ranges when clicking the enemies and will be helping on optimizing the code further

Refactoring and MOJO sprint

Hey!

Refactoring is done! It went a lot smoother than we expected, now it's time to work on the other enemies AI which will be pretty simple i believe and on the upgrades which will take some work but won't be too hard.
Most of our level generation  and visual responses from the skills is already done aswell.

Keep reading for updates regarding our sprint for MOJO.

Cocos Development week 7

Hello there!

We have finished the refactoring of our game, and we can now have levels with more than 20 enemies! During this weekend we will be checking some of the enemy behavior since there are more enemies on the map now, and we will finish the behavior of the other special tiles.

This week, we chose to start refactoring our code to make it more adaptable do scenarios with multiple enemies and the random generation on enemies prefabs. Apart from that we're also improving our visual aspect on the player's skills for make it all more responsive and working on the remaining enemies AI.

Discussions on how to proceed next and Refactorization

This week we've been discussing the best way to proceed and bring our game to the best state possible. We ended up deciding on refactoring and optimizing our code, as well as finishing up most of our planned features for the game and the complete enemy behaviour.

Cocos Development week 6

Hello there!

This week we are refactoring our code, to be more easily understandable and fix some minor bugs. I will also try to finish the remain enemy behavior that is yet to complete.

The Playable Prototype

So this week progress boomed from what we had last week and we made a simple playable prototype, ready to play, with all the powers working nicely, aside from still lacking cancel options. We're now putting it on hold for a few days, because of workload on other sides, but we're planning on polishing the game, adding more enemies, more behaviours and optimizing the game pretty soon!

Cocos Development week 5

Hello there!

During this week I couldn't participate in the development of Hero of Light as much as I would like, because I am finishing my thesis report.

Stay tuned for the next features!

Hey!

So this week we kept working on our first real functional prototype and managed to do lots of progress,

We also did some play testing with a few users and, overall, the response was great!

Here's the result we've achieved so far:

Functional prototype and testing

Hey!

This week we have made plenty of progress regarding the development of the functional prototype and right now, we're missing the players basic 4 skills and enemy ai appart from the warrior.

I'll be focusing on the player interactions and skills, mainly making it all work well together, for intance the leap + charge mechanic.

The soul and upgrade aspect of our game will be left for a later stage of the development.

Game close to playable!

Hello! This week the map generation was achieved and integrated with my colleagues' work. Everything's going smooth and dandy aside from a bug or too. It's worth to note we changed the logic that our map was working due to the constraints it would pose eventually, however the change was made relatively fast.
Also more sprites were made in order to further complete our game and push it into a playable version so we can start worrying about tweaking and improving on it!

Cocos Creator Development week 4

Hello there!

We have finished the attack action of the goblin enemies, and both the enemies and the hero can only move on adjacent hexagons now. Also we have implemented the game over function, and created the remaining sprites that we had to add to our game, such as the hero powers, and his health points and mana.

During this weekend I will finish the archer and mage attack pattern, so we can test this prototype with our focus group.

Weekly Report

Hey|!

Unfortunately this week i didn't have the time to do any work apart from the workshop and documentation stuff at the begining of the week as I'm currently in Exponor at Porto participating in  e-university league representing IST.

I'll be back with the boys sunday and i'll resume work as soon as possible.

Map generation incoming!

Hello guys! This week I've been exploring cocos even further and the map generation is looking bright! The map's already made and is working and showing up on iPod and even my cellphone!



I'm now working on the map matrix and random generation of all the special tiles and enemies on the map, hopefully by the end of the week we'll have something to finally fiddle with!

Cocos Creator Development week 3

Hello there!

This week there has been an improvement in the movement of the enemies. I have completed the movement of the knight and the bomb enemies, while the movement of the archer and mage enemies is practically done, the only movement that remains is for them to run from the hero when he is in an adjacent tile to them. During this weekend I will try to finish this remaining movement, and make the attack action of the enemies.

On a good path!

Hey there!

This week has been going slowly, but slowly, since cocos is new to us, but all going according to our expectations, after some tutorials I'm getting the hand of this new tool and learning a little bit more about the cocos functions.
Since I'm responsible for the randomly generated content I'm gonna start experimenting with moving a sprite randomly every time I load the app, and go from there to randomly place enemies and special tiles on top of our map, that of course, need more specific positions to put them.
Hopefuly we'll have a good advance by the end of the week.

Workshop and Development

Hey.

So this week we've been working on our functional prototype which has been going a bit slow as we're still learning a lot about cocos creator.

Apart from that we're preparing the workshop that we'll be doing with a few members of our focus group and we're also looking into making some improvements on our design document.

Cocos Creator Development week 2

Hello there!

This is week we tried to make two levels in our game, one without enemies and one with one enemy.

The first one is complete, when the hero character moves to the exit of the level, the player advances to the next level (that is at this moment another scene in the assets of our project). The development of this first level was complicated, because there were many things that we still didn't knew about Cocos Creator that we needed to know, such as how to change scenes, how to move a spite to a position based on a mouse/touch click, etc. Fortunately those are solved and we think we will achieve better results faster than before.

Also Cocos Creator released the 1.0 version for Windows and Mac. We already mitigated our project to that version. There were also some few project examples that Cocos released that may benefit the development of our project, such as a UI demo that includes multi-resolution supporting menu interface with transition animations.

Everything set to go! Learning cocos creator and designing first iterations of our characters!

This week we finally sealed the deal with miniclip, luckilly cocos creator is still in the game and as so I've been focusing on watching a few more tutorials to learn more in-depth about this tool, so I can finally start randomly generating the maps, enemy positions and special tiles!
I also started designing the first iterations of our hero and basic enemies.

I started off with trying a tool called Aseprite( http://www.aseprite.org/ ), which is an excelent tool for pixel art, in which I started drawing our hero, but left him incomplete:

I was more than satisfied with the tool, but it ended up being a little too detailed for the current state of our project, maybe I'll be back to it in the future. Instead I sticked to a more oldschool pixel tool called Piskel (http://www.piskelapp.com/) which is a browser tool that allows you to draw lower resolution pixel art and ended up being more satisfying for what we have now:

Hero

Enemy Goblin

Enemy Archer

Enemy Mage

Also, adding to this week's work, we also did some usability tests with a boardgame version of our, soon to be, mobile game in which people found the game to be interesting and were actually looking for further prototypes to come.

Hope you enjoyed looking through the current progress of our game!

Hey!

This week we did some usability tests with a couple of users from our focus group using our board game version of our prototype. Overall people loved it and couldn't wait to try the actual thing.

Other than that, we've set our next goal, which is to build two simple maps (0 and 1 enemies) and i'll be focusing on the player movement and controls.

Cocos Creator development

Hello there!

After talking with Miniclip, we had the green light to develop our game using Cocos Creator. So this week we will try to make two simple levels. The first is the hero clearing the level, without enemies and just heading to the exit, the second his clearing the level with one enemy knight present in it.

As I am responsible for the AI component of our game, my main focus will be on the movement and actions of the enemy knight in the game. 

Decisions, Cocos2d-x and Cocos Studio

This last week has been all about decisions on what languages to use, discussing more about the game, how it will be and possible low fidelity prototypes. Unfortunately we were a bit set back because of needing an answer from miniclip, but that didn't stop us from exploring our possible tools of choice to make our game.

Like my colleagues I've been fiddling around with Cocos Creator, which unfortunately will be left behind because of the inability to build onto iOS, and Cocos2d-x on Visual Studio. I've been watching several tutorials trying to make the most out of Cocos2d-x, since I am unexperienced with it.
I will also be making the simple art for the game using a tool that seemed similar to SpriteBuilder for Mac, that's called Cocos Studio. I'll be sure to get into it as soon as possible!

Oh and...Happy Easter!

Documentation, cocos 2d-x and low fidelity prototypes

Hi!

So, this week we finished up some of the documentation required such as game scenarios, gameplay loops and focus group definition.
 I have also been playing around with cocos 2d-x and setting it up on windows as that will, most likely, be our tool of choice for the development of this game.

Appart from that, we've also been discussing some ideas regarding the game's concept how to integrate it into the low fidelity prototypes.

Happy Easter and see you next week!

Practice on Cocos2d-x and Cocos Creator

Hello there!

After the good news of our group being accepted in a partnership with Miniclip, I decided to install and do some tutorials of Cocos2d-x, since we do not own computers with Mac OS.

After installing the Cocos2d-x and running it on Visual Studio, I've done a programming tutorial series of  Cocos2d-x, which can be found here: http://www.gamefromscratch.com/page/Cocos2d-x-CPP-Game-Programming-Tutorial-Series.aspx. It covers functionalities such as printing a simple Hello World, basic sprites, mouse events, keyboard events and action handling.

I also found Cocos Creator which is a game engine similar to Unity 3D, that is based on Cocos2d-x an works with components structures and JavaScript. I have also done a tutorial of a simple game which can be found here http://cocos2d-x.org/docs/editors_and_tools/creator-chapters/getting-started/quick-start/.

Our choice of what we will use to program our game will probability be Cocos2d-x, since Cocos Creator can't build a game for IOS platforms. 

Hi! Lead programmer is here!

Hi!

The game goal that I will work during this semester, is Artificial Intelligence of our game. This includes the movement of the enemies towards the player, and their actions.

The team role that I was assigned to do, is the Lead Programmer. I will be responsible for managing the tools or programming, version control and technical documentation.

Hello! Game Designer here.

After some discussion the group decided that i would be assigned the role of Game Designer so I will be responsible for promoting the discussion of the concept's ideas, documentation and the deffence and communication of our concept.

As for the individual goals, i'll be in charge of the players' movements and interaction, aswell as the game's resource/economy system.

Apart from this, i've started to study up on some cocos-2dx and thinking about some simplification of some of the original concept's ideas.

Hey project producer here!

   My goal in this project will reside in map generation! Basically what I'll be doing is making a randomly and procedurally generated map that will scale in difficulty as the game goes on, creating an infinite gameplay aswell as a sense of progress.
   I've been already seeing some things about cocos2d-x so I can work confortably on it.

Possible Miniclip Partnership and Presentation Feedback.

Hey!

This week we're exploring  the possibility of working with miniclip for this project and developing in Cocos2d-x for the first time. Following the pitch, we've received some feedback that made us decide to simplity of our original concept ideas.

Keep posted for more news as we dive into the ios development world!

Hello World!

Boas! Nós somos o grupo 6 de MDJ, do lab de 3ªfeira 13:30 e o nosso jogo é o Hero of Light.