Beta Aftermath - Refinement work before Final Release

Well, my hopes came true. The Beta-presentation went terrific. The teachers and the crowd liked the music that I chose, as it fitted the mood for the game. They came up with ideas and drafts on how to change some of the graphics, particularly the backgrounds, but nothing for my mole sprite (and the animations for it), which I think is a good sign. It seems like everyone likes my mole design; they think he's a cutiepie who you easily can relate to. I think my work with the mole is as good as done.

I haven't done much work for this week, since we've now finished most of our graphics for the game. It's actually been more work for the programmers, since they must implement the rest of the graphics, as well as looking for potential bugs and other problems. The things that I have done this week is a spawn animation for the sponge (the powerup for our game) and looking for a fiting menu track.


This is the spritesheet for the sponge animation. I made three frames where the spawning part begins, that is I made these partially transparent. Then I made five frames with five bubbles, with each of them moving slightly for each frame. First I draw one bubble, then copied it five times and changed their sizes with the free transform-tool. For the two last of the five bubble-frames, I made so that the bubbles look transparent, in order for them to disappear completely in the final frame. This final frame will then be replaced by the actual object, which the mole can pick up.   

This is the result.

It didn't took that much time to find the menu music than what it did for the background music. I revisited the royalty free music sites, and in one of these I found these two tracks: Run Amok and Hidden Agenda. I think the latter would fit perfectly, since Run Amok is too upbeat that it would rather fit for a level in the game. Also, the Hidden Agenda track sounds very good when you loop it.


My main priority for this week, and especially for next, is to write the project report, because it's absolutely vital in order to pass this course. I began writing it on sunday last week, and it must be turned in next friday. Also in friday we will have the final release for the game, that is: submit our game to our tutor and have a gigantic play test where we play each team's game one final time, before we'll start the theme park course, the week after the play testing.

Our two month long game project will soon reach its end, and that's very sad.  This has been an really fun, engaging and learning time for me, just like in last year's projects. Even though we've had a huge setback with the exchange between isometric to top-down perspective, we've managed to overcome that by working 200% each day (well, at least during the first weeks after the alpha presentation) and then perform an awesome beta presentation.

We have come this far, and it's really fun to know that our hard work for the past weeks after the frightful alpha presentation is finally paying off. The alpha version was a huge mess, but now; the game is nearly complete.