Ninja Royale was picked as one of the eight games to be prototyped, which is awesome! One of the main points we discussed as a team after having talked with Rodger and Bob about the game's potential, and things to be cautious of, was the importance of not being married to any one idea just yet. While the original pitch was a ninja-arena-battle game with avatars, we want to be sure to be open to, and testing, other game aspects. Certainly being cautious of the multiplayer deathtrap of indie games, we explored ideas with single player and co-op, both with and without stealth mechanics. Rodger's idea of creating a game with such tightness and polish that players could master and create strategy over, effectively creating a sport was a big hit too. (As a highly competitive League of Legends player myself, I definitely enjoyed this suggestion.) The addition of skill trees or skill sets was interesting as well, and something I hadn't thought of much before, but is most certainly worth exploring. Such concepts as a ninja being expert in stealth, agility, or distraction etc (or even non-ninja classes) is very intriguing and will require further thought.
Jumping in head first, Adam and I went to the EAE lab after our cs3130 class and got a simple avatar running around. I just downloaded a simple code sample and ran it, nothing too code heavy, but I wanted to get the experience before heading to work. (Sadly, my Xbox is currently sporting the "Red ring of death" fashion statement, so I won't be able to test avatar code within the comforts of my own home.) I just barely finished a Player class that contains all of the logic for setting up a player viewport. I am rather pleased with the code, as it is very crisp and dynamic. I could easily add a method with just a few lines of code that would allow for players to leave or join the game at anytime, instantly changing up the viewports on the screen. While this doesn't seem practical for our game idea, it's nice to have such possibilities come to mind having a clean foundation for our player objects.
Carrying forward that will be a major focus of mine, keeping a clean modular architecture. I feel this is key in allowing us to easily expand and grow our code base, being most optimal for when five or so more programmers start working on the game as well. Additionally, this serves the prototype phase very well, allowing us to remove gameplay code that ends up not being what we want, without bringing the game to it's knees because the code was so heavily woven within the game's engine.
The next phase, now that my split screen code is setup (supporting 1-4 players) is to give each player their avatar to be played. I anticipate having this done by Thursday so that I am able to go test it (and fix anything that doesn't work correctly) in the lab.
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