Weekly Progress - Dylan

In the past 2 weeks, we determined a bunch of milestones that we figured should be our next tasks on our lists. Of said milestones, I was assigned to work on a couple of different things.

The first, and biggest milestone I worked on implementing was the Fatigue and Instrumentalist changes that we've been talking about. I redid a bunch of the code behind the instrumentalist 'slots' during a battle, the instrumentalist, the instruments, and the patterns. The slot is now its own entity into which the player places an "instrumentalist" (or musician). There are three types of instrumentalists - string, wind, and percussion - which can each only play the instruments of their class. They each have their own stamina - starting at 100. Playing a note costs them 1 stamina, and if they don't have any left, the pattern is turned off and they stop playing. After they haven't played any notes for 5 seconds, they start regenerating their stamina. The longer its been since they played, the more stamina they regenerate a second.

I also redid some of the UI elements for the instrumentalists, so there are now three buttons per slot: one to change the instrumentalist, one to change the instrument they are playing, and one to change the pattern they are playing. (Currently the fatigue is shown on the button for the instrumentalist swap, but this will probably be changed to a bar gauge in the future.) Clicking one of them will pop up a menu allowing the user to select a suitable replacement. I reworked these to all look similar and keep a consistent UI, and also to allow us to filter out options - ie, if you have a String instrumentalist, you will only see string instruments in the instrument change list. (Some of the logic for instrument classes was one of Kyle's milestones, so some pieces are awaiting the merge with his stuff).


My next major milestone was to add the tempo option which Prof Rosenstock mentioned in the last meeting. We discussed this during our meetings on our own during the week, and I did some thinking on the balancing of how it would work out. With the way we have the game set up, it seems to balance itself out as a tradeoff between the number of monsters each note will hit, and the time it will take for the players to regenerate their stamina. Stamina cost is based on how many notes are played, so speeding up the tempo will drain their stamina faster, though regenerating is based on real time so they will not regenerate faster. Since the regeneration works faster the longer they haven't been playing, this could still pose an advantage if played correctly.

The tempo logic is mostly implemented, though I'm still currently finishing it up.

Finally, I also wanted to get some work done on the Note Offs and the durations if there was time. We discussed a different UI during our meetings that would allow us to make a more sophisticated step sequencer which would allow for note durations. I have also looked through the code and designed a solution to turning notes off, but have not yet had time to implement it.


Also, as usual, I will be merging my and Kyle's changes to try to have a demo which shows both for the meeting tomorrow, as well as trying to integrate as many of the art assets as I can.