Week 1

On Monday, Alex and I began our Senior Research Project as we entered the office of our mentor, Mark Vange. Our first day was primarily dedicated to setting up a schedule with Mr. Vange both in terms of when we would come into the office (Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays) and in terms of how far we should progress in our project each week in order to finish on time (spoiler alert: we're on schedule for this week). Additionally, we determined which tools we would use in the coding of our game: Piskel (for character sprite creation and editing), Tiled (for level creation and editing), and MelonJS (for our primary game engine). Finally, we concluded our first day by attempting to familiarize ourselves with Tiled and MelonJS by creating a test level. However, we left the office frustrated, as we were unable to even render our empty level in-browser.

The next day we entered the office ready to tackle our first real challenge: rendering the empty level. It was hard. We were able to determine that the reason the level would not render was because the code we had used for it needed to access a third-party application (MelonJS) in order to print anything, and Google Chrome was suspicious of such a program. We first attempted to start Chrome in a "allow-file-access-from-files" mode, but it still failed to fix the problem. After at least a couple of hours of Googling fixes, we fixed it, using the "grunt serve" task that I still don't really understand all that well. However, it worked! We were excited. Adding a player character into the game would prove to be yet another challenge, however. To make a long story short, we spent an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with our code, when in actuality any problems we had could have been solved if we had simply seen the tiny "+" icon in the bottom left corner of our Tiled window. After adding the player character , platforms for him to jump on, coins for him to collect, and enemies for him to avoid, we left the office excited for the days to come.

Thursday, when we returned to the office, we worked on adding sound effects, a transition to another test level, and a title screen. Essentially, we had made a decent test game, and had familiarized ourselves with the tools we needed to create the bulk of our game. Now all that's left is for Alex to make hundred of sprite animations, me to make level upon level for the player to face, and for us both to figure out how to combine the two. Seriously though, we know a lot more today than we did on Monday. A whole lot. Good week.

PS: We're working on uploading our test game. When we do, we'll be sure to post it on each of our blogs! :D