Progress Bar

This week I worked on the Progress Bar for loading the game.  Before we had a template version of an animated flashing icon until everything was loaded.  The team didn't like it since the user didn't know how much longer to expect before the game is loaded.  I made a progress bar that would estimate how much longer you have before your game is done loading and you can start playing.

There continues to be flashy text that animates below the progression bar that says "LOADING".

Unloading a Game

For the last week, I've been working on unloading the video game if someone tries to exit the game back to the main screen.  To do so, I had to first understand the template of how Screens are created in the menu setup so that I could make an in-game pause menu and understand how each method works off of the library template we use called XUI.  Understanding their template which makes the game very cool, I was able to understand how to create options that would exit the game.  While exiting the game, it calls an unloading script before placing the main screen placeholder.  The unloading script is setup extremely simple so that any one of our game developers can easily call methods as we find new bugs while unloading the game.

I unloaded all of the main details of the game like the character from the level and the sound effects.  The hardest thing with this is that the team never implemented unloading methods for drawing images or stopping the sounds since their main goal was to just get the drawings and player charactermatics loaded into the game.  This taught an important lesson to our team in which we should all implement unloading techniques as we're implementing loading techniques so that we don't have to go back and relearn the code in implementations we create which would save a lot of time.

Menu Screen Refactoring

Starting the new semester, we got right back into work with the game.  I was immediately assigned to work on the menu system in getting back and forth to the game and exiting the game back to the menu screen.  A lot of the code for the menu screen was poorly created so a major part of my week was understanding what the code was doing as well as refactoring the code so that it was loading the game in the correct areas.  I also was involved in a lot of the discussions of what we needed to do to turn the alpha into a full-on game.