This past Friday the 27th of September in my networking class we were introduced to our first full class game jam. Our job was to recreate the old Spacewar game for online. The first thing we had to do was split into teams of 2. My partner was Alexander Beauchesne. We decided to work with his past projects, which he has done a lot of background work already which he enjoys. This framework he has been working on has made our lives for this jam a lot easier than if we went with what we were given at the beginning of the semester. The hardest portion that we worked on was getting our explosions to collide both correctly and accurately. The way we were always having 4 shield taken away when we first started playing with this. We kinda knew why it was so, but we didn't know how to exactly fix it. First we threw in a joke that we could have a shield health of 160 and show that divided by 4. This technically fixed the issue, but we wanted to go back and actually look at it properly. When we changed the amount of collisions possible after explosion to 1. This caused the players to never lose any amount of health. If it was 2 it would take away 2. So we still needed to clean it up so it would work at 1. We worked with different ways to send packets in a hope that this would reduce the problem. At first we were sending all packets in a way that took up to much time and they weren't necessary every time we sent. Then we realized the collisions was being done in a scene of the explosions where it affects a player, but the player doesn't check. When it came down to it we realized we had a chance to fix it normally, but it would update a lot which meant we had to re work a lot of the project. We decided to go with shield is 80 / 2 because it loses 2 every time it gets hit. This "Hack" or "Feature" does not affect efficiency or any play-ability of our game. Although as programmers it hurts us, we decided for the well being of our health to move forward and produce the rest of the game. The easier parts of the game were getting the game play to work. We would spend more time making sure everything would work efficiently as well as focus on being ready for the bullet fix ahead of time and make sure we know that.
Pile's Blog
