Unlike the rest of the gang, I seem unable to participate and note-take at the same time. The smart thing to do would have been to dash this report off when my memory was fresher, but I didn’t. Apologies. Gang, if there were nuggets that you took away from the session that I’ve failed to document, please add them in the comments.

We started with Jason’s The Landmarkers, which had advanced considerably on the graphics front with more landscape and building detail. He had added the beginnings of a user interface — brass plaques — but nothing was clickable yet. We discussed how to make saving the buildings matter to the player, and the idea of having multiple endings depending on which/how many buildings were ‘marked was brought up. Miguel lent his Scratchpertise in regards to making the buildings clickable.

Miguel had added some nice touches to the Night of the Cephelapods, adding audio dialogue, bullet indicator and a improved the interactions between the player character and the enemies — when they’re shot, they become angry (faster and red eyed) and when they hit the player character there’s a little zapping animation. The player health hasn’t been implemented yet, but Miguel said he was interested in going with a Halo-style regenerating shields approach (where you have to avoid enemies until your health recharges). The Lovecraftian audio was as funny as expected though it sometimes overlapped, a bug Miguel intends to squash.

Ben did switch to the Adventure Game Studio tool which he was very excited about, having been able to drop the backgrounds in and get his character walking on walkable areas properly quite easily. We talked about the possible challenges his character would have to overcome on his pixelated Queen St. West, and buying coffee and getting a bum out of the doorway of her workplace were discussed.

I then showed Plastico Baggera, which I had transplanted from Scratch to Game Maker. Pooping was persistent but nearly random enough. Bouncing on El Jefe was implemented and declared to be quite fun. Some suggestions included an extra bounce off the seagulls to allow for chaining kills, and that the level of difficulty should be ramped up after a while.

I then talked about focusing on getting the games into a playable state in a way that was meant to be encouraging but probably ended up sounding stern and lecture-y. I am going to revise assignment 5 so that it focuses on playability rather than “getting a level working” because that’s not as clear.