DAY 69

Today I started off with playing a game called terraria to maybe get some inspiration for our game since the two games are very similar. I first noticed the sun placement and how it wasn't actually animated which took away from the immersive aspect of the game. After that I exited the game and began to work on some more particles. I began to work on a rain particle effect since I had already made a snow/ash one and it would be easy after creating that. I wasn't sure why but the rain was looking very weird and was being too sporadic and going in all directions. Jake and I worked on this together and found a solution that made it look quite good, but wasn't covering all of the screen for some reason. We stretched out the emitter all the way and it still didn't cover it. After christmas break I will try and make it look better, and who knows what I'll start on that far ahead in the future, maybe even a whole new game.

DAY 68

Today I worked on particles again with Jake. I started without him trying to make a rain effect. I made the shape of it to lines, adjusted the opacity, changed the colour, and speed, and a bunch of other things to make it look like rain. I imported it onto my desktop to save it, and it had this weird error message thing that I didn't understand and the program quit itself and nothing saved. So I had to cut my losses and move on. At that time Jake came in and we were playing around with it to try and make a fire effect or sun effect or something. We weren't quite sure what it was but it kind of looked like magic and Ty was intrigued. We werent sure how to implement it, but if you change the colour to a sort of brownish colour, we could use it at the player's feet to make it look like dust or something when they are walking. After a while of playing around with it we came up with a sun looking thing. Next class I will maybe try and make fire or something else.\

DAY 67

Today I played around with the particle maker program trying to figure out what to make. I wanted to make rain or snow or something falling from the sky but I wasn't sure how to move the emitter and stretch it out so that it looks like rain. I found out how after a while and I basically played around with it for a while until it looked good. I exported it and put it into my player object. It worked right away and looked pretty good but the snow flakes looked kind of big and cartoony. I went into the code and adjusted the size to make them smaller, and the alpha value to be more transparent. Then I adjusted the speed, and amount of the particles, so that it looked like it was slowly moving down; like snow does. After that it looked pretty good, but the snow went over the ground and didn't look very good. I tried adjusting the depth to make it go behind the ground, but nothing worked. So basically all I did was adjust the depth of each of the ground objects to -1, and that worked fine. I'm not sure if it looks better that way or not, but I'll leave it as it is. Next, I wanted to make fire, because fire is cool. I followed a tutorial but didn't end up finishing it due to the lack of time. Plus, it wasn't working anyway. Also, I got Simran's mountain background from him which we need to combine with Jake's original. Next class I will probably continue to work on particles.

DAY 66

Today I decided to scrap the text box idea as it was causing too many unknown errors within some of the ground objects, which doesn't make any sense whatsoever. I also noticed that when the mouse turns to the left and right, the player doesn't move towards that direction. So with Howie's help we took the code from the player's arm so they turn towards the mouse. Ty was working with particles and things which sort of motivated me to do what I did for the rest of the class: the same thing as him. I've had some experience with particles before, but not really enough to create exactly what I want within code. I youtube'd a few things and found a particle maker application for game maker studio. Basically you can adjust the particles how you like and actually visualize it. I wanted to try and make snow but I wasn't sure how to move the emitter. I was playing around with it and learned a bunch on how to maneuver it. This can be really useful with any particle effects we need to make in the future. Next class I will try and make something we can implement into the game.

DAY 65

Today I was going to work on fixing the three arms when holding a weapon and standing still issue, but Jake was doing arm and gun sprites, so I didn't want to make anything that's going to be replaced in the future. So I decided that in the beginning of the game, the player needs to react to the environment (being that he is surrounded in blood and there is bodies everywhere), as people do. We can't just have animations of that because: 1. That takes too much time. 2. It won't really explain anything and might be confusing. So I wanted to make text boxes for the reactions. As always, I went on youtube and found a video that would be useful. I followed through the video, and created a script, a text object, and a text trigger object. Basically what I want it to do is pop up when the player collides with the trigger, and scroll a line of text with a text box relative to the size of the text and such. The way the video did it was whenever the mouse clicks in a certain location, it spawns text, so mine is a little different. This might be why it created a few errors; one of which I fixed. Jake and Howie both tried to help me with this error but they don't know much about scripts, so they left me to deal with it. By the end of the class I didn't figure it out, so I will have to do that in tomorrow's class.

DAY 64

For the first half of the class I helped both Jake and Nick on their work. For Jake I helped him work on the water/blood object and sort of critiqued it a little bit while also helping to work on it. After doing that It looked quite good, but didn't have any movement to it when the player was in it. This takes away from the immersion but oh well, we are going to add a sort of splash effect when the player moves or gets up to a certain speed. I helped Nick work on a dodge movement, which ended up not working with me helping. After that I went to my own computer and worked on applying each of Jake's new player sprite images onto the sprites. For that I had to erase some arms and colour in some arms to be short. After that I noticed that the player had three arms when wielding guns, but this can be easily fixed by adding a variable that changes the sprite when wielding a gun and not moving, so it erases an arm. After that I wanted to make it so that when the mouse reaches a certain point above the player, it snaps to the left so that it doesn't make the player's arm look weird when moving around. I ran into multiple errors so I called Howie over. We figured out the that it would be easier to just have it so that the sprite changes to the left when the mouse x value is less than the player's x value, and vice versa. Overall this works alot better and now looks good. Next class I will maybe make it so the player doesn't have 3 arms when wielding a gun and not moving.

DAY 63

Today we watched a video that helped to create the water effects that we are trying to do. In the video, it is way too reflective and not really distinguishable as water so we are going to change it, or try a different approach. Also, it is not red, so we have to change that as well. After getting multiple errors, we kind of gave up and decided to import Jake's new running animation/character. In the midst of this our school went on surprise practice lockdown, so we crowded everyone in the office. We had to put each of the (left run sprite to the left side,etc.). Since the player animation isn't finished, it looks very broken. Next class I will try and get Jake to work on the animation, and then figure out what we are going to do with the water situation. We talked about it, and we think we should have the water/blood as just basically a reflective line, and when the player's speed is equal to a certain amount, and if he first touches it, it splashes, but isn't realistically rippling.

DAY 62

After about 30 days I finally get another chance to work on the cut-scene, and that is what I did today. I followed a tutorial to help get me more familiarated with timelines and such since I haven't worked with them for a while. I started by making it so that when the player is in the room, cutscene = true and the timeline starts playing. This actually didn't seem to work which isn't surprising because since when does anything I do actually work. But seriously, I have no idea why but when the player is in the room, its index is supposed to change to the sleeping bag one, and it doesn't. I think It may be because of Howie's weird "spawning" system. Since I don't actually have to place the player in the room to have it be there, this could be what is causing the problem.Also, I got Nick to work on a sort of sandstorm effect.

In other news, Jake wrote a story which relates to our game, and inspires me to take reference from it. It mentions the player waking up in a basement filled with blood to about the guy's knees, which is like Jake's concept art he drew earlier. I want to put aside the cut-scene for now and maybe try and get some blood water physics and such. It would be really creepy and awesome, and I think we could implement it into the beginning of our game, so I think that's what Jake and I will do next class.

DAY 61

Today I continued to try and figure out how to fix the view and make it look good. I tried a few more things that still didn't work, so I asked Howie and we figured it out together. He math'd it out and made everything relative to the size of the window and such. This finally worked and we got a view for both the outside and inside. I added the glow for the player and the room_dark object to make it cinematic. Also, I made it so that the screen follows the player horizontally but not vertically on the inside, and both horizontally and vertically when he's outside. I really like this feature personally. Also, I worked with Nick on a sandstorm/snowstorm particle effect. I think realistic snow or sand would be a really cool and immersive feature to the game. He followed a tutorial and then tried it himself on my computer. Once he finished we put it in the game and ran it. Actually, it didn't run. The game just didn't want to run when he put the object in the room. When it isn't in the room it runs fine. I think it is because there is no step event in the sand object, but I'm not sure why it would cause the game to not run. Anyways, inside the house looks very cinematic at the moment so next class I hope to start on the cut-scene finally, though I do want to make a sort of fade from the top of the wall into the darkness in the room.

DAY 60

Today I continued to work on the view problem and try and see how to make it not stretchy. I have no idea why it is doing this but I created a new room, and added all of the resources in. I set the room size to the size of the walls and floor combined so that it isn't a huge blank space. At first I didn't set the view and it didn't seem to be stretched out, I then set the view to the size of the room, and it did the same thing it was doing before: stretching out. I creating another room, and another, trying anything I thought would work. I don't understand why it's doing this. This whole thing has given me a headache. I might have to create a view object, this would be a lot better. I could make it so if the player is in the house, the view is smaller, and if the player is outside the view is a lot bigger. Also, when the player goes inside from outside and vice versa, the view zooms in and out. This would be ideal but I'm not sure how to go about this, I'll have to look into it once our game is more developed.

DAY 59

Today I tried to fix the weird thing it was doing with the view. I thought it was something related to the view thing I put in the player object that Ty gave me yesterday, but it wasn't because when I deleted it, it literally changed nothing. I tried so many different things I can't even recall what I did. I think I may have to create a whole new room, or maybe create my own view/settings. Also I'm not quite sure if Stephen is apart of our "team" anymore because he seems to be creating his own game so I'm not sure how that contributes to ours. Simran is working on mountains or something, I'm not actually quite sure. Howie is working on music still, which is going very well since he is a magician. Jake did a bunch of different corpses during his spare time yesterday and also did a concept art picture which looks really cool, and I suggested that we use that in our main menu in the future. Next class I will create a new room and try and fix the view.

DAY 58

Today I tried to implement parallax scrolling with Jake's background. Also, he completely lost the background that he made 5x bigger than the normal background, which is extremely unfortunate. Anyways, I basically took Ty's code for the parallax scrolling (with his permission) and attempted to pull it off myself. This obviously didn't work because why would it. I didn't manage to get a screenshot of it but the layers were upside down and everything was messed up. Also now the view is stretched out for some reason. I have no idea what's going on anymore, parallax broke everything. It's ok though I think I may know how to fix it. I'm just kidding I have no idea on how to approach it, I'll have to bug the genius Ty to figure out how to make it work. Also, Jake thinks that the story needs to be changed since we changed the game to a platformer so it changes everything. I'm not sure if I agree with it but if he comes up with a good idea I'm willing to give it a chance. Tomorrow I'll attempt to fix parallax scrolling.

DAY 57

Today Nick wanted to join in with our work as we showed him the game and thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to him in his whole life. Basically the majority of the class I showed him the game and a few of the Game Maker basics. He tried making a tree but it was sort of sub-par to our original one, so we scrapped it. It's ok Nick you did good. After that I continued on my work and started on the cut-scene, which is going to be quite a bit of work starting from scratch again. I started by creating a few variables for it, I'm going to need more though. I made it so that when the cut-scene starts the player index should be the sleeping bag, but it didn't work so I'm going to need a variable that changes it in the player object. I also got Jake to work on animations and such. Below is a picture of Nick in science class.

DAY 56

Today I worked on the lighting within the room. I kinda want to create light coming from "outside" through the window, but it would be kind of hard. Something to do later on though. I worked on the lighting and aesthetics for inside this house. Jake and I tried to make it so the city background was behind the window, and you could see it from through it, but it kind of broke after that. He clicked the "delete contents that are outside of the barrier of the room" thing and it really broke as you can see in the first of two images below this. I had to find out what it was that was breaking it first and then fix it. I deleted all of the contents of the room pretty much and restarted. After I fixed that I made it so that the light emitting from the player is duller and more subtle. I also put barriers as "walls" to make it so the player doesn't fall through the world. Next class I will try and attempt parallax scrolling with Jake's background maybe, that or the cut-scene.