Jimmys Software Project

This week we made some significant milestones but also ran into some significant issues. We managed to finish the level blitting, movement and item interaction. Some problems we had was with duplication giving a turn delay, buttons not working correctly, movement bugging out in places, flickering guard images, guards not alerting and being able to be eaten by the character. The primary way we approached all of these problems was by printing out a list of variable status' and lists to help target the issues at their source. I also added additional help screen tutorial slides due to the adding of an escape and reset button in the levels. The game is currently in most of its completion, just lacking some guard tracking and killing mechanics. Next week we aim to complete the last central part of the game which is guard movement and interaction, then from there we will finalise our other parts of the assignment and debug where necessary.

This week we focused on finishing pieces of the overall program to integrate the parts into the whole program fully. We worked on finalising the mechanics and data section of the code. Alongside adding graphical elements into the program and rounding off some of those graphical features such as sizing and the formatting of the code in terms of how we interact with the graphics, removing approximately 100 lines of code due to new, more efficient ideas for approaching some situations, gathered from our increased knowledge since the start. I also completed the menu screen including a help screen which consists primarily of a slideshow presenting on how different mechanics of the game work with a picture and text to explain that mechanic. This coming week we hope to complete the development of the data mechanics side of the program and move onto integrating all the parts into a playable game through the use of importing the mechanics function into the main game file.

This week we made substantial progress in the development of our game. I proceeded to develop the graphics, stumbling upon many consistency and formatting errors which led to multiple retries, I also had to shrink the pixel scale size down by a quarter as 3000, 3000 pixels doesn't fit on a screen, so it was resized to 750, 750 and everything scaled relatively from that. I then proceeded in making a working file for the menu screen and its interactions as well as the level select screen. I initially did this in separate files but then discovered it was too difficult or impossible to run another program in a program as python seemed to only support the importing of another file to call functions from it. One of the major problems I faced was in the program loading the images, continually causing errors, I tried multiple ways of writing out the files location etc., and resulted in a full location script (e.g. "C:\Users\Liam\Desktop\Assignment graphics\back button.png" ) whic...

This week we continued through the process of developing the game. Our main progress was in the area of graphics in which we started making individual graphics files to be manipulated for separate path sections as well as characters and items. Next week we plan to continue that to get a working model of the game for further testing beyond desk checking.

During the holidays we made a multitude of progress through the execution of programming our game. We started working on multiple functions for game mechanics as well as implementing the levels system (above) which allows us to easily add, remove or edit new levels through a grid-like system to plot the contents of the level. This week we also started to develop our storyboard designs and algorithm as well as IPO chart. Next week we plan to continue to program the games functions as well as finish the storyboard and some individual graphics to id with the testing process.

This week we steadily continued working through pygame tutorials in order to further our understanding. in addition to that we planned out the way we where going to go about programming the game with some large discussions essentially resulting in no library and using a list of lists to store the board designs for levels through a coordinate and item based system. over the holidays we plan to continue on this progress and start programming the mechanics for the game.

This week we made some headway into the development of the program. We started to plan the way we were going to structure the code, through using pseudocode, and some ideas through python. We are currently working on an algorithm for some mechanics in the game, and others we are just programming straight into python. We debated whether to put the functions of the mechanics into a library and access them in separate files for separate levels. However, we decided it would be best to just keep it all in one file, and we came up with a system for programming each level. The idea is that we have all the mechanics of the game defined at the top so that we can just plot out the board in a list of lists, and the functions and items within that list will work themselves. We also started to do some basic 8-bit graphic design to help visualise the output of the game. Next week we plan to continue developing our program and planning for the code.