Category: Lucas’ Status Reports

This week, I worked primarily on integration and debugging. I added an audio component to the game loop itself, allowing the music and game to play simultaneously. I was primarily focused on integrating mine and Yuhe’s parts of the game, adding some way to transition from the menus into the game itself by selecting the song the user would like to play. On a song request, the game must read which song was selected and then fetch the associated audio file and json representation of the game, which I still need to find a way to efficiently store.

Next week I’ll finish integration and audio synchronization, allowing for a seamless transition from menu to game and ensuring that the game itself is exactly what it needs to be for the user request.

As far as testing and verification, since it’s a bit more difficult to quantitatively test a game like this, I’ll start by having some user playtesting – I’ll then gather feedback and try to deploy it within the game. I’ll then try to measure performance, primarily FPS, and ensure that it meets our desired 30+ outlined in our initial design requirements. Further, I’ll likely need to just play the game with a number of different audio files, ensuring that the notes and music are synced, and making sure that there are no errors in parsing the JSON file.

This week I focused on finishing integration of my game with the signal processing by adding a functioning JSON parser that will allow for the output from the music analysis to be played as a game. I also added a result splash screen that displays at the end of each game, with a few more detailed statistics and graphs that I plan to add to later.

Next week I’d like to finish integration to allow for a gateway between the main menus and the game itself, ensuring that each song saved by the user can be clicked on and played. I’d also like to clean up some UI and make the game more visually appealing.

This week, I continued to make the game into an actual game utilizing the new engine. Like I (maybe) said last week, the engine doesn’t cover much of what Unity did, which means there’s a lot more tedious work related to drawing and keeping track of data structures containing info about game elements. I was able to add back things like timing, scoring, tracking multiple note blocks at the same time, and the beginnings of a JSON parser that will generate the actual beat map.

The game looks and feels a lot more like an actual game now, barebones as it is. Next week, I’ll finish up the JSON parser to fully integrate the signal processing aspect into the game and add more visual feedback to the game/UI elements that should make it more engaging for the player. I’ll also add a gateway between the main menus and the game itself, allowing for more seamless transitioning between parts of the game.

This week, I continued to work on the core game loop in Unity. I was able to add in a scoring system, and began work on implementing a json controlled beat map instead of dropping randomly generated notes. I also spent considerable time debugging a few things that ended up (mostly) being due to misunderstanding some Unity stuff. I also worked on writing the design review, and had to write up a few sections for it.

Next week, I think I’ll have to spend most of my time integrating; switching my sections of the game to use the game engine Yuhe developed, and writing it up in C++. I’d also like to do some work on the game’s visuals, as right now it doesn’t look great and could use some UI updates.

This week, I continued working on the main game while taking some additional time to focus on the design review.

I began implementing some more core features like using a JSON file to generate our beat maps as opposed to just having them place note blocks randomly, and began some of the work on the scoring system. Next week I aim to finish up with these two features and hopefully begin working on some more front end details, to make the game feel a bit more like a game for the time being.

I also made the slides for and presented the design review, which means I took some time outlining our project in a slideshow and doing a bit of presentation preparation. I’ll need to continue this a bit by writing up some of the design review’s written portion this week.

Made progress on core game loop. Wrote some scripts controlling note blocks and note block destruction/timing, currently note blocks are only randomly generated. I’m on track and want to continue progressing on the game by allowing the generated beats to be controlled by a JSON file instead of random generation, and incorporate more accurate timing feedback and improve the UI. 

Familiarized myself with the tools we’ll be using to develop our game and learned some of the syntax of C#  – worked through beginner Unity tutorials, and began to code some simple programs that may resemble parts of the game. Did some research and brainstorming on how best to represent certain important data structures and parts of the game.

For next week, I’d like to have  a basic working and playable “draft”; something that incorporates some of the basic gameplay elements of the final game. I’d also like to begin on some sort of home/settings pages on top of the core game loop.