Sprint #6

Task: Come up with alpha level incorporating features so far/ that should be finished.


So I came up with some drawings of what the first level can be.  I haven't implemented it yet because 1) some of the features aren't done completely or I don't know how best to use them 2) I want to approve it with my team so that everyone is happy with the outcome.

Here are the drawings:

Sprint #5

Task: Figure out how to fake the shadows effectively, or a way to do them dynamically


Ok this has been super hard.  I've been going over tutorials that I found online and trying to see if I cvould modify them to fit our game.  The problem can be seen in this picture:

As you can see the shadows are highly distorted and don't really work in our game in that they no longer retain their shape in shadow form.  So I found this other shadow tutorial http://www.riemers.net/eng/Tutorials/XNA/Csharp/Series3/Pixel_shader.php which is in 3D but we might be able to port it to 2D.  Garrett is also helping me with this and he has an idea using translation matrices which seems to work somewhat effectively.  Here are some things that we might be able to improve on Garrett's in order to make it work:

1) When the player is vertically aligned with the light, the shadow completely disappears which I don't think should happen.  I think it might be rotating at some point which causes the problem.
2) Make it so the translation isn't too far away, right now it seems to be going further than it needs to.
3) We some how need to let the shadow know not to go through the ground as show below.

Sprint #4

Task: Help Garrett with converting the pixel units to sim units throughout the game.

To do this I helped Garrett to solve problems with the camera when the units were converted.  I think that was the biggest problem.  Now the player can move!

Sprint #3

Tasks: Make the collisions with the blocks actually be on the blocks.  Put lights in game and make trigger so know when player is in the light.

So the collisions were fixed in class thanks to Garrett and Rielly.  I added a lot to the project this week.
Here's what I did (short and concise so easy to read):

• Added light from prototype and made it so the actual lantern could be collided with but the light part was just a trigger.
• Put in the first art of the player and made a mock shadow.
• Made it so when player is in light shadow appears and player can go into shadow mode
• Once player is out of light, shadow disappears and can no longer go into shadow.

Here are some pictures:

Player in light with shadow

Player in shadow mode

Player out of light and no longer has shadow

Sprint #2

New Objective: Help Taylor with what ever he needs for the Level Editor.  The Level Editor is when of the most important parts of our game so we need to get it done!

So while I was doing this I found a big problem and that was that collisions are not working correctly.  For some reason the collision boxes are completely off from where the sprite is.  I worked all weekend on this, and am only slightly to a solution.  Still trying though!

See some collisions are working but they don't work in general

Sprint #1

For this sprint I was in charge of:

General Environment/World which entailed Basic World that adheres to the laws of physics.


I didn't know how much to do with this but I made a block class that can be used to as building blocks for a level.  They are bodies in the FarSeer engine so hopefully they have physics to them.  Here is a picture of the level I made.

Note: I do not know what the symbols on the blocks are.  I just searched for one on
the internet and this is what it came up with.

It doesn't look like much, but it should be enough that people can test basic mechanics.  In fact, I have to put in something that represents the player to test everything still.  If I have time I will also implement a death zone which could either be implicit   (falling off screen) or just making some sort of trigger.  A good future sprint for this would be implementing the rope across the gap.

2D Dynamic Shadow casting

So I looked up some XNA Dynamic Shadow Casting and this is what I found:

I first found this blog
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/t/34665.aspx

which based his code off of this blog:
http://www.catalinzima.com/2010/07/my-technique-for-the-shader-based-dynamic-2d-shadows/

but the first blog is trying to optimize the second one.  This person (I don't know if it's a boy or a girl) also went off of this article:
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/dynamic-2d-soft-shadows-r2032

Just in case we want to get something going for the next sprint here is just some shadow advice:
http://www.virtualrealm.com.au/Blog/tabid/62/EntryId/154/Drawing-2D-Shadows-in-XNA.aspx

One more:
http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/74436/453356.aspx

Oh heres my search:
http://www.google.com/search?aq=f&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=dynamic+shadows#sclient=psy-ab&hl=en&source=hp&q=dynamic+shadows+XNA+2D&pbx=1&oq=dynamic+shadows+XNA+2D&aq=f&aqi=&aql=1&gs_sm=e&gs_upl=2537l3459l0l3698l3l3l0l0l0l0l418l826l4-2l2l0&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.,cf.osb&fp=a7d5b7030ebfa2c5&biw=2304&bih=1174