This is going to be a more technical heavy article, which is really what most of my posts should be about. Anywho, one of my tasks this last week has been to build an installer for our game. Given that we are building the game in Unity, it'd typically be pretty easy, there's a very easy build system built right into the editor. You select the scenes you want, in the proper order, click the button and let it go!
When has that ever worked? I imagine it probably would work pretty well for a normal game, but ours is running three separate programs, two simultaneously to handle all the weird stuff we do. To start, when the game launches, we allow the player to select any mp3 they want. This was a problem in itself because the file dialog box we were using was only available in the editor, so just to build I had to find a workaround for this. Once the file is selected we launch a C++ program we wrote to parse the mp3 and generate the level from it. From there we launch the game in Unity, and PureData, an open source audio engine, since Unity's Fmod wrapper doesn't give us anywhere near the amount of control we needed to manipulate the song in real time.
Because of all these shenanigans, we are constantly referencing song and level data files that are stored outside of Unity. Turns out Unity isn't a fan of that, their system has you throw every asset required for the game into a Resources folder that then gets written to a giant binary file. That won't work for us, so I've been figuring out a work around. When you build a Unity project it creates an exe and a game_data folder which is apparently uses as its working directory. If I copy over our External folder into the game_data, everything is then in the right place. However, several little things have been causing a problem since, such as even though the relative paths are right, I can only seem to get files to successfully open with absolute paths. Additionally, each method we use behaves a little differently, some require forward slashes, while others prefer back.
Once I get all the file reading to work properly in the built version, actually creating the installer should be fairly straightforward. Since this game is going to be Windows only, Visual Studio has a Install Wizard project type I can use. I just have to tell it what folders and files are required for the install and it more or less behaves like every other Windows install wizard you've ever seen. It's pretty fancy stuff.
Hopefully we'll have a working installer we can send out to appease the masses by tomorrow.
Monday, October 14, 2013
Design, Communication and Faculty
So anyone who has read my blog posts from the end of last semester knows that we made a lot of dramatic design decisions with the game in rapid succession, without really settling on the best and without really having time to implement any of them. We got more or less got to an alpha build over the summer, largely thanks to Cody and Sherly, but as soon as school started and everyone was back to have an opinion on design we seemed to lose focus once again.
Our biggest problem is probably communication, because if you were to actually track what the engineers have been building over the last 6 weeks you'll see we've more or less been on a similar track this whole time. We've have a couple weeks where we tried new things to see if they were fun, but for the most part we've been working toward the same goal this whole time, while discussing potential designs a little too loudly, that were never meant to be officially implemented ideas.
In addition to that, the art side of of our team has fallen behind due to lack of communicating our needs. With both of those combined, every member of the team had a different idea of what the game was supposed to be, which became painfully obvious when it came time to present to the faculty last week.
With the lack of art assets and direction so close to our IGF submission deadline, everyone was worried. In retrospect, I think the problem seemed a lot bigger than it was, but it finally got us to sit down and plan out exactly what we want the game to be before and after IGF. After a couple hours of design discussion we decided to change how a few features worked, which makes the game feel more comprehensive as an experience and is just more fun to play. Ironically, its quite a bit more like the original prototype than it has been since May.
On top of that we have outsourced a bit of art, put Zeph in charge of the in house artists and seem to have a bit of a content pipeline going. Of course, fall break just hit, which put a bit of a snag in our new found groove, but all the engineers are still meeting twice this week to implement a bunch of the mundane but necessary things such as fancy menus and building an installer (which I'll write about next, because it's proving to be quite the ordeal.)
Things should hopefully be going a bit more smoothly from here on out... we shall see!
Our biggest problem is probably communication, because if you were to actually track what the engineers have been building over the last 6 weeks you'll see we've more or less been on a similar track this whole time. We've have a couple weeks where we tried new things to see if they were fun, but for the most part we've been working toward the same goal this whole time, while discussing potential designs a little too loudly, that were never meant to be officially implemented ideas.
In addition to that, the art side of of our team has fallen behind due to lack of communicating our needs. With both of those combined, every member of the team had a different idea of what the game was supposed to be, which became painfully obvious when it came time to present to the faculty last week.
With the lack of art assets and direction so close to our IGF submission deadline, everyone was worried. In retrospect, I think the problem seemed a lot bigger than it was, but it finally got us to sit down and plan out exactly what we want the game to be before and after IGF. After a couple hours of design discussion we decided to change how a few features worked, which makes the game feel more comprehensive as an experience and is just more fun to play. Ironically, its quite a bit more like the original prototype than it has been since May.
On top of that we have outsourced a bit of art, put Zeph in charge of the in house artists and seem to have a bit of a content pipeline going. Of course, fall break just hit, which put a bit of a snag in our new found groove, but all the engineers are still meeting twice this week to implement a bunch of the mundane but necessary things such as fancy menus and building an installer (which I'll write about next, because it's proving to be quite the ordeal.)
Things should hopefully be going a bit more smoothly from here on out... we shall see!
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