Update #2

Hello there!

It’s been two weeks already and it’s time for a new update. Fun stuff first before we get down to the serious business again, shall we?

For the major deadlines due this week we had scheduled a meeting in the week before. And even though not all team members can show up at every meeting we always make the best time out of it. This one in particular I want to tell you about, the attendants were: Max, Joep, Thomas and me (Deborah). On a spare screen we projected a giant lit Christmas tree on one half and on the other half was Spotify projected with a playlist of Christmas pop songs.

Continuing on that meeting, the update Thomas’ laptop requested took way longer than expected. This caused some laughs, frustrations and delays. But instead of just wasting those two hours by doing nothing interesting and just staring at the screen he went to get the four of us lunch. That’s the kind of thing we do for each other. And I have to say (and maybe I’m speaking for the whole team when I do) that I actually feel quite lucky to be part of this team.

And continuing the things we forget from the last update. What did we forget these two weeks? Well mostly setting alarms at the right time and noting wrong dates. We all have our moments sometimes. Some more than other. (I’m one of the “some”, regrettably.)

In the past weeks we haven’t done a lot of fun stuff, even though programming our game is still considered fun to do. We mostly worked seriously on the game and in the meantime worked hard on our other lectures, because we had an exam coming up. By the time this was posted we can finally enjoy our Christmas Break. This will still include quite some Super Plumber Bros? time because we have a lot of catching up to do, especially in hours of work and not necessarily amount of work.

Now, down to business. I’ll keep it light this time, don’t you worry. The engine is now near done and we’ve reached a point where we can start implementing the first level so that it’s actually going to look like a real game. Or more specifically like the very first level of Super Mario Bros. You know, the classic 1-1?

For as far as the first level implementing goes, we have one straight path for now. No stairs, no platforms, no abysses. For the demo, this worked just fine. By the time the next update of this blog will be posted we hope to have a decent level finished. It may not contain all features yet, but as long as it has platforms (with plain brick blocks and power-up blocks) and a finish (staircase and flag). But for now it looks like this:

Add to that we worked hard on the models to have some of them ready to be shown to public during the presentation past Wednesday. Max finished the brick block and the coin and I made a mushroom. Even though there’s always room for improvement (especially mine, or maybe that’s just my opinion), this is the result so far:

Max has currently finished up the flag and I’m starting on the Goomba. Giannina has finished the green pipe and star model while Christina is working on fire flower. No pictures of those yet.

Enough about the models and back to the code. It has been checked this week and we got some decent commentary of things we can fix for our final result. One of the things mentioned was that we didn’t have enough comments for every method. O well. And our classes were a little too big with multiple uses, so we probably need to split classes in smaller partial classes which will somewhat change the class structure explained in the previous update.

Getting back on the subject of libraries from the previous post, we had some talk about that last week. Since we expected to take longer for every delivery that must be done we are kind of behind in hours and in the end we are going to have quite some spare hours with “nothing to do”. So we are going to need to grab some should have’s and put them on the must have list. One of those is most likely going to be the virtual reality. And since an Oculus Rift is too expensive to get our hands on we would opt for the Google Cardboard option. Problem is, XNA (in which we write our code) does not support this.

To solve this problem we would need to make a connection with Unity to stream the game through on our phones and in order to do this we will need to use an existing pre-made library, because this is way beyond our knowledge so far. In the end we’re still students and not (yet) professionals.

Anywho, that would be it for this update and we hope to see you back for a new update on the 8th of January in the next year. But for now:

Happy holidays and have a blast in 2016!

Update #1

 Hello!

We’re back with an update about the progress on our game, team and other related events! But before everything else I want to point out that if you still do not have any idea who we are, there’s a special page dedicated to that, go check that first.

Let’s start with all the fun stuff. Our team went paint-balling with another team and that was worth every bruise. And last week we played Dungeons & Dragons for a few hours. And between those events we had quite a few gatherings, they were mostly serious but we also laugh with and at each other. Not only do we forget things like our PSUs from the meeting room but also some funny typos and funny slips of the tongue.

We consider the name of our team, Confused Plumber Productions, a funny topic since the way we made it up is actually quite silly. We just went to a game studio name generator and kept refreshing until we found something that caught our attention. The full name itself wasn’t that interesting, but the adjective was: confused. And since we’re recreating a Mario game we used plumbers. (If you didn’t know Mario’s a plumber: shame on you. What are you doing here?)

Add to that ‘productions’ (we could have chosen ‘studios’ or ‘software’ or something like that, but we liked the abbreviation: CPP).

Now back to the serious stuff, because that’s probably the main reason you’re reading this. We worked already quite hard in the past two weeks between all the laughs. In a little over a week we have a deadline of a midterm report and a presentation of our progress to the other students, so we have to have something ready to show them.

At the time of writing this our main programmers, Joep and Thomas, are almost done with the basic engine to run the game, after that we can finally start writing the game itself (read: the levels, the characters and their behavior and the special objects like power-ups). From the start of the project Max has been working on the models and the first blocks are almost ready to be added to the game. Though we realized that the work it’ll cost to make all the 3D-models is much more than we first thought it would be. So after Christina, Giannina and me, Deborah, were done with general stuff documenting related and simple artwork for logos we decided to start with 3D-models too.

The logo of the game will be:





The class structure in the engine looks like this:

We hope this somewhat makes sense to you, but if it doesn’t here’s a brief explanation of it:
There are four static classes that check for collisions between 3D objects (Collision), control the settings of the game (SettingsManager), the graphical user interface: GUI and the class that deals with the players’ input (which is in our cases keyboard keys): InputHelper.
Then there’s the class: Main, which contains the classes that initializes the camera and the different game objects. GameObject not only contains some other classes for different kinds of game objects but is also a superclass of all the different kinds of game objects.
In our code we like to add references to our other hobbies and such. One of those is the method that is going to delete objects from the levels like the coins Mario picked up on his way, it’s called Exterminate. (You better understood that reference. To what the Daleks say in Doctor Who.)

One of the first discussions we had relating to the structure of the game was: Should we or should we not use libraries from other developers? And we decided against this. Other discussions touched topics like: What program are we going to use to make our 3D-models? Who is going to make which models? What levels are we going to implement first? And the Must have/Should have/Could have/Would have. Max likes to work with 3DStudio for the models, but the rest will be working with Blender. At the time of writing we’re still not sure who is going to make which models. The levels is a discussion we postponed until a moment we are actually going to write the code for this and we’re not there yet. And the MoSCoW is a list that’s currently almost a whole page long. The most important information can be summarized as this: it Must have the basic elements that made the Mario a big success and it Would have a level editor but we already found out that this would cost us too much time we don’t necessarily have. Maybe in a later update we can tell you that other things made it to another part of the list higher up to make our game even more awesome than we already hope it will be.

Until the next update!