A setback... and progress

Last night: We continued working into the night, Ahmed was working on porting the physics engine to the Zune platform, when disaster struck.

We discovered that one of the features we were going to use to draw our character to the screen was not available on the Zune HD platform.

This led to a lot of worrying and a mad panic to come up with alternatives to the rendering system we will use for the soft body animations.

Today: After discussing our options and a meeting with one of the Dare mentors, we were less panicked about the issue.

We have a number of options ahead of us, from writing our own rendering system for the soft body physics to scrapping Zune compatibility, though obviously that would be an absolute last resort.

By the end of the day we made significant progress in other areas of the game development.

Input recognition using a mouse was completed, I wrote a function that can determine if the user draws a happy or sad face. This will need to be ported over to the Zune to use touch screen input, but the logic used will be the same.

Camera movement is in progress, Dennis created a camera which can follow a sprite through the game world, with a couple of tweaks this camera will be ready to implement in the full game.

Ahmed continued work on porting the physics engine to the Zune, to the best of our knowledge it is working, though we still can't draw the objects on the screen to fully test it.

The artists spent much of the day planning and researching. Kate produced colour pallets and some concept drawings of the environment, while Henry also produced concept artwork.