Week 15

This week has been a fairly light week compared to last week.  I have been putting the finishing touches on a couple aspects and making a couple of the later levels easier because the difficulty was too intense.  But the actual work on Fat Ninja was fairly low.  What has taken up a bit more time has been doing the final prep, working on the site, power point, etc.  All told, this week has been busy, but a much needed break from the hustle and bustle of the past couple weeks.

Week 14

This week has been my longest and most productive week yet.  I completed all of my remaining levels, 3-3, 4-1, 4-2, and 5-1.  I didn't have any more issues and the one error I was having on 3-3 refused to show itself again and didn't interfere at all.  The only challenging part about all this is the time it took. 

With that said, next week will be finishing touches.  I will go back through the levels, make sure all the sushi is positioned right, add finishing touches to it, etc.

Week 13

This past week has been one of my busiest ones yet.  I completed levels 2-3, 2-2, 3-1, 3-2, and got a good start on 4-1.  This made a large improvement and easily doubled the levels we already had completed.

The only problems I had was with level 3-3.  I'm pretty sure I know the issue, there are too many enemies in the level.  But I'm not sure where to change things and so I will be talking with Tate on Thursday where we will decide what to do.  The only issue is that if we back off on enemies in 3-3, then when we do the final level which is supposed to be very long, we will have very few enemies there.  Regardless, things will be decided Thursday and Fat Ninja is on it's way to being completed next week.

Week 12

This week proved a surprise to me.  I had business that took me out of town so I made preparations to accomplish my work away.  The problem though, is that for Fat Ninja to compile, you need an internet connection even if the ADT is referenced locally.  As such, I have been unable to complete any levels this week.  As soon as this is done being typed I hope to work on a level tonight and tomorrow morning so I can hopefully have one level done for tomorrow.

I did manage to complete a couple new levels from world 3 though.  This will lighten the work load a little bit for this upcoming week which means I can hopefully be able to complete my leftover work from last week.  My worst case scenario is I can't accomplish any of my left over work for the next 3 weeks.  All told, this isn't the end of the world though because week 7 is when we are aiming to be done, fully built and finished.  But week 7 is still a week that can have work done in it so if through some issue or another, I am unable to complete a level until week 7, missing a day from it won't impact our schedule too greatly.

Week 11

This week has gone great  for me.  With the exception of a couple issues early on, I have made great progress. Early on, when I hadn't looked at the code much, I was getting some errors and issues.  But within about an hour I found out what caused them all, and I could read the code sufficiently to negate them all.

As for my work, I have completed 3 levels this week, as in I have debugged and tested them so that they are in Fat Ninja.  Only the last level I did, world 2 area 1, needs more work and that's because enemy types and terrain obstacles aren't in and will need to be placed.  But this can be done at a later time and should take a fraction of the time it took me to do the levels.

More Updates

For the past while, I have been continuing work on Fat Ninja and I have just switched back to continuing the updates on my personal blog also.  My post for this week is the following:

This week has been one of my most productive yet.  I spent the first half of the week trying to get eclipse fully working.  I uninstalled and re installed it on my primary system and things didn't work.  I then tried to install it on a fresh computer and everything worked fine there.  The only difference (besides being a fresh computer) is I had to install 32 bit on the other system.  When I tried on my primary system with 32 bit eclipse worked fine and the errors I had with my code at large were fixed. 

Andengine proceeded to have issues then.  I proceeded to Google a few things and after testing some solutions (adding a library type, fixing/cleaning the file, etc) nothing seemed to work.  I'm still not sure why, but when I took a look at things today, the Andengine issues were fixed but then Fat Ninja still had a ton of errors.

After talking with Tate and looking through some options, the only thing I can see is that the Andengine files aren't actively in Fat Ninja's library and as such, they aren't being referenced in any way.  I haven't found a solution yet but with the issue narrowed down so far, I hope to have everything fully functional tomorrow.

As for my progress, outside of the computer issues I have coded out a preliminary form of levels 2 and 3.  I have levels 4 and 5 partway done and plan on having those completed for tomorrow in a similar form.  I will also have at least 1, I'm aiming for 2 more levels drawn out and if possible coded in though having the ideas down is my priority. 

All told, despite not having the levels actually done, I think I have managed to stay on top of things sufficiently that I am not too far behind.  By the end of next week I should have 6 levels fully completed.  If my goals for this week are met and my computer is running for next week, I should have 4 levels completed and 4 more coded if not necessarily debugged.

Week 1: Concept

This is week one of Senior project and things are looking good so far.  I got in a group of very good people which gives me great hopes for our project right off the bat.  We decided to make a side-scroller running game on the android platform.  This will be similar to games like Flood Runner or Robot Unicorn Attack.  You will play as a fat ninja who must use his sword and other abilities to dodge obstacles and make his way through a series of levels to try and prove himself to his fellow ninja's. The idea sounds solid, it will be more cartoony but the idea is sound.

Now I have been brought on as a level designer.  In short, I will be the person making all the maps, placing the obstacles and such to make the level challenging without being impossible and to come up with ideas to make the levels better.  This is great, but early on there isn't as much to do.  Because I also joined with the group after the high concept was mostly developed, my first week is being spent mostly learning the platform.  I've never worked on android before or with java.  So for the time being, I am honing my skills so they will be up to the task when my part is ready to be started.