This week I had to write 3 papers, so most of the work for the week is being done this weekend. I’ve been putting together some of the elements for the HUD and the game menus.

I created a flash example of the 5 main icons that will be present on the game screen. I did a lot of coding and made sure that everything was dynamic, so that we can just throw the status icons right into the game.

This week i’m doing coding for the server. SmartFox has a pretty easy documentation system except they (like the rest of the world) are slowly integrating from AS2 to AS3.

So far i have the listen server working on a local front (127.0.0.1) and want to test it as a full server later this weekend, early next week.

I know a few people want to try it (Jervo) so I’ll have the chat client up as soon as i get the server situated.
Initial Launch Phase teaser image.

I spent more time playing with the Papervision3D libraries. Familiarizing myself with them to get ready to start programming the final menu. Jared and I are going to post all the design concepts up at our next meeting and get everyone’s input for what we all want to see and get out of the main menu. You can see my rough menu here.

This week I really didn’t get too much done. Since it was midterm week I had 3 papers due, and two tests to study for so I was pretty occupied. I did mess around with the couple of errors that people were posting in the comments under my tutorial and I think I managed to fix them. I posted a comment to them…haven’t gotten a response yet.

This weekend I really wanted to get started on the grid system that Jared mentioned, but I’ve been feeling under the weather and haven’t really left my bed (stupid winter…can it hurry up and be summer already!?) Hopefully I can play around with this tomorrow if I’m feeling better, in which case I’ll update this to reflect what I did.

This week I finished character concepts as well as a basic level layout. The level layout will be used as a guide for the team to construct the code for the game itself, almost like a walkthrough. I will be taking all the descriptions I had put up before and translating them in to images.

The character design is very simple. I got inspiration from the vintage fisher price little people. We need them to be simple because they are going to have to be built in papervision. Also, the animations will have to be fairly simple as well, probably a simple hop for movement since, 1) building complex arm and leg animations in papervision will probably be very difficult, and 2) very time consuming. We want the game to function first before we get to any deep aesthetics like this.

character desgign: http://thefourmation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/character-design.jpg

level layout: http://thefourmation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/level-layout-copy.jpg