Flap
Development Diary Peer Review Playtests Results
27-Mar-2011
Flap has been up on the Creators club for peer playtesting. There have been some good issues identified. The playtest feature of the creators site is really worthwhile and I would highly recommend making use of this valuable resource. See http://creators.xna.com
The dynamic "hotkey" control system seems to work quite well - some good comments back about it.
Some of the particle systems get in the way - this was mainly caused by the changes between XNA 3.1 and XNA 4.0 - some subtle changes in display. The net result made the enemy arrows hard to see. I've changed some of the blend modes and colours to emphasis the right bits.
There are quite a few places where I only process key presses when a button is released. This works fine for some types of action but not all. Some, e.g. firing, absolutely need to continue to respond if the user continues to press the key. Of course, you need to respond with an appropriate time delay otherwise you will fire 60 times a second. This release allows the user to navigate the menus and the ingame spells selection with "keydown" style processing. This leads to a much more intuitive control method.
Difficulty: The GamerServices class supports the default difficulty that the user would like to play. The UI allows the player to override (on choose start level menu). The difficulty then has three separate effects: the spells are cheaper/more expensive, they last longer/shorter and the dragon takes less/more damage.
PlayerIndex.Four controller doesn't work. A silly bug where I only iterated through the first three controllers when scanning for which controller the player is currently connected on.
Confrm to Exit. I have added an extra menu if the user presses "B" on the main menu.
StorageDevice selection. The code uses StorageDevice.BeginShowSelector to allow the user to choose where to save games / state. This originally was a "once only" location but with some changes in the menuing code this could be invoked multiple times. The moral here is to make sure you test with multiple storage devices on the Xbox.
All the spells now have hot keys; the spare dpad and shoulder buttons were just enough.