Zoom function and Slider

21 October 2012

I gave the latest version of the game to Li Hao to try and I took note of the really good comments he gave from his observations of what I added recently.

- Jumping sound is not synchronized with the player (we decided it was best to remove the sound altogether after analyzing several games - the problem is that the character has many animation frames and it would require a very proper sound to match the frames, plus a sound is needed for when the player touches the ground which complicates things)
- Trees in foreground should not move (they move because I attempted to do a 3D parallax scrolling effect in which objects in the foreground move faster than those in the background, but failed to create a very good visual effect. Thus I have removed it.)
- It would be nice if the turtle speaks more (the speech bubbles currently use the same text)
- Forest level rocks do not fit with the game style (hmm, maybe I should remove the rocks? But what can I use to decorate the soil?)
- Enemy growling sounds are funny, but gets annoying after a few times (I tweaked it eventually so enemies only growl once in their lifetime - at the moment the enemy's aggro is triggered)
- Levels with high zoom are irritating sometimes. (Fix zoom levels ASAP!)
- Li Hao said he really like the door sound effects (I was really pleased to hear this)
- Decorations make levels a lot better (this made me really happy too!)
- Pressing UP key at Elevator contradicts with game's standard pressing DOWN key to use portals (this has just been corrected)

Also, not a comment he made, but there was a flaw with my bonus level where the turtle collects a picture. If the turtle dies directly after collecting the picture, the bonus level is reset and the picture disappears. It is not a bug but is something I don't want to happen, so I prevented the player from falling off edges and dying on that bonus level.

Every time he gives me comments, I have a lot to tweak, but I am really thankful and happy for these comments! I really need more comments and testers to find flaws in the game that need tweaking if I want this game to work out well.

It's very important to constantly seek opinions and comments to make adjustments to whatever flaws exist and remove them early, rather than keep adding stuff excitedly and realizing at the end that there is a big list of things that need to be fixed and corrected. Now that would be really demotivating.

20 October 2012

Today is quite an exciting day! At the end of the day, I have finally managed to create a working slider that affects the zoom of the game. By sliding the bar to the left, the game is at 1x zoom. When it is moved to the right, it slowly increases to 4x zoom!

I actually opened one of my long notepad documents and played around with their slider to figure out how Microsoft actually did their sliders, because I was experiencing some problems with my slider's functionality. My slider required precise movement of the mouse, and when the mosue moves too fast, the slider is unable to catch up and stops following the mouse.

Another one of the other problems was that the coordinates of the mouse is constantly changing with the different zoom levels. When Flixel zooms, it zooms from the middle. So the origin at the top left isn't (0, 0) anymore. The x and y become negative. And the slider depends on the mouse's coordinates.

I managed to fix the issues, so the slider isn't so restrictive. It works absolutely brilliantly now! I also fixed a bug with my elevator animations not playing properly. Today was pretty much fixing areas in the game which were problematic. I learnt quite a fair bit today.