For this week, my tasks were to help with testing and finish the animations for the game. On Wednesday, all three of us met after class in techspark to conduct more tests of our entire system. I’m also recruiting some more friends to test our game during finals week for any last week improvements.
I worked on adding animations to the game, namely for when the player hits the arrows and they disappear (there should be a little boom after an arrow disappears) and for text that pops up indicating how precise the player was. The current implementation of animations is incredibly slow, since each animation rescales an image every time it is drawn on the screen. This becomes an issue when we have too many arrows on the screen at the same time. My plan to fix it is to have a few pre-loaded key frames for the boom animation that are played in sequence, instead of rescaling the same image every game frame. The text pop up animation has not been implemented yet, as I’m trying to get the boom to work first.
For this upcoming week, my goals are to finish the animations, make sure our display scales properly to the monitor we will use during the final demo, and work on the final deliverables. I’m also going to upload the latest version of the software to the RPi, but now that the major hiccups for that have been figured out, I anticipate that it will be a straightforward task.