Week 11 and the Holidays

During these three weeks, I made quite a bit of progress on the game. Continued to work on the look of the game, changing the graphics for some of the units, the hub and the background.

I have also done most of the movement and firing of units and towers. Although there is a bug were they seem to lose their target and shot to the right of screen. So I put a temporary reset button to fix that problem during testing. Also the units all overlap each other at the moment, and I plan to stop this at some stage.

Work done, holidays and week 11, 21 Sep - 11 Oct;

game - Made graphical changes. Made scripts to control anti-air towers, helicopters and firebombs. Made a script that shows the cost and stat upgrades, when an upgrade button is highlighted. Made a script that makes the Laser robots return to a central position of the screen when not attacking.




Will

Week 10 - Making the waves

This week I made some functions that control the enemy, once the game is started by the user clicking the start button. The enemies are sent in waves every 30 seconds. The waves are stored in an array, each 30 seconds the next wave gets added to the array and the units get created.

I also did some more optimising of the code, as well as made some graphical changes that are closer to that of the final design. There were some other minor but necessary functions added to the game this week.
Work done, week 10 13-19 Sep;

game - Made some graphical changes to the game, the hub is now at the bottom of the screen. Enemies come in waves every 30 seconds. Helicopters now go to the brewery and steal the beer. Brewery can be damaged. When enemies are killed score increases. Units now cost money, will not allow user to create more if not enough money.

function.as - Fixed show stats functions so that stats are displayed when a unit is clicked or the build unit buttons are highlighted. Function to upgrade units was added although at the moment does not require cost.

waves1.as - Contains the 25 waves of units in arrays.





Will

Week 9 - More coding of the units

This week was spent finished the coding the creation the of the units and towers. As well as the towers and units appropriately moving and attacking. This code was mostly the same as the code used for the previous weeks work, except for minor changes here and there for each unit. At this stage all units are randomly placed at creation.

I made a bit of code that displays the stats of units when highlighting over the respective creation buttons. Unfortunately at the stage it means that the clicking units will not show their stats.

I also put in a bit of work to optimise the code. This included creating a separate action script file that contains most of the external functions that are called at various times.

Work done, week 9 6-12 Sep;

game - Produced code that builds Anti-Air Towers, Fireballs and Helicopters. As well as scripts that control these units movement and attack. Optimised scripts. Changed the buttons in the game and made build/upgrade units tabs.

functions.as - Made an external file that contains functions, some of these are used to optimise the code. Scripted a function that shows the stats of units, when highlighting over the respecting build buttons.

The big red balls are the Fireballs, the hexagons are the Helicopters and the yellow and black things are the Anti-Air Towers. The Helicopters cannot attack, but instead go for the brewery and try to take the beer. The Fireballs attack the towers or the brewery if there is no towers. The Anti-Air Towers can only attack the Helicopters.


Will

Week 8 - Coding the units

This week was spent doing coding that created and controlled most of the units. Two of the three towers as well as the robot, and one of the enemies units were done. I decided that I will not have the squish robots, as a do not like the idea, I may replace it with another unit, or just remove it altogether.

I also needed to change the stats for the units, as the range was way too short.

Some of the code that was done, was found on the net by doing google searches, from previous projects and samples, or from the MPP forum.
Work done, week 8 30 Aug - 5 Sep;

game - Produced scripts that make as well as control their movement and attack for the Laser Robots, Laser Towers, Missile Towers and Firemen. Made a script that shows the stats of a currently selected unit.

units.xls - Changed the range for each unit.

units.as - Updated from changes made to the excel file.


The black ones are Laser Robots, green Laser Towers, white Missile Towers, red Firemen.




Will

Week 7 - Working on the game units

This week was another when were I didn't do much on this assignment. I worked on getting all the stats for the units down and making sure that they were comparable, although they may need to be changed after some testing has been done.

Work done, week 7 23-29 Aug;
units.xls - This is a excel file with all the stats of all the units.

units.as - An external Actionscript file that contains most of the units stats, hit points, attack, defense, speed-movement, speed-reload, and range.




Will

Week 6 - Working on the game layout

This week I did a little less work on this project. What I worked on was the menu and in-game layouts of the game.

Work done week 6 16-22 Aug;

Game - Worked on the menu and the in-game layout.



Will

Week 5 - Online website testing, starting the Game

During week five I did some more work on testing the site. I uploaded the site to the internet to allow some other people to test the site, and found some more errors so I fixed those. The site is here

Currently you can do the following;

Sign up
Login
Logout
View Profile
Edit Profile
Edit Account
Use contact form
Confirm account

I have also done some of the layout in Flash. I have pushed back the website a bit so that it will be completed at a later date and I will focus more on the game at this stage. I have also changed the due dates for the game as I didn't allow for the holidays originally. My internet is capped at the moment so I haven't been able to update my tasks as often.

I decided to make the site and game have a bit of a retro feel, in terms of colours and fonts etc.
I got some inspiration from some of the following;
Design Melt Down - Retro
Design Melt Down - Retro 2
Design Melt Down - Retro 3

I liked the idea of the following sites header and wanted something similar with the colours;
Good Widgets

I was originally also going to use the following tutorial to make the header, but it wasnt coming out how I wanted, but I still have used the colours.
Retro Text

Work done, week 5 9-15 Aug;

Tested PHP - Tested the PHP of most of the website, except the highscores table

Game - Started doing the layout of the game




Will

Week 4 - Finishing the XHTML

During the fourth week most of the time was spent finishing off the XHTML for the website.

When I finished the pages I wanted to make sure they displayed everything properly even without CSS. So I tested them using MAMP. MAMP allows me to view them locally on the Mac. When I loaded the pages up, except for the index.php, they just showed a blank page. I could not figure out why and so I uploaded one of the pages and tested it online. I discovered that there was a couple of errors in the PHP, but MAMP wouldn't tell me this, it would just show a blank page. So I eliminated the errors by way of narrowing it down and so the pages correctly load. Testing is yet to be done for the sign-up and login etc parts of the site. I used XAMPP on windows and that shows the PHP errors, I have not tried the Mac version yet.

I have decided that the imagery for the game will be done during the game production and not the first thing. The imagery for the site will be done when imagery for the game is done as they will share common elements.

Work done, week 4 2-8 Aug;

functions.php - There was some errors in the PHP which were corrected.

signup.php - Errors in PHP were corrected, and XHTML was done.

profile.php - XHTML was done for this page.

login.php - Errors in PHP were corrected and XHTML was done.

highscores.php - PHP errors and completed XHTML.

game.php - XHTML and JavaScript completed.

editprofile.php - Fixed PHP errors and completed XHTML

editaccount.php - Fixed PHP errors and completed XHTML

contact.php - Completed XHTML

confirm.php - Completed XHTML

Assuming the site works properly it will be like this one, except for the lack of forgot password, and comments features.
tourofduty.milkmandesign.com.au

Other features that I want to add to the website if there is time at the end;
AJAX check username
Forgot Password
Multiple types of Highscore types and sorting options
A resizing image functions.
Comments

These are the contact, login and signup pages respectively, without CSS.



Will

Week 3 - Finishing the PHP

In the third week of the project, time was spent finishing off the PHP programming for the website. Also some of the XHTML and CSS was done.

The website imagery was initially due at the end of the third week, but this was delayed a week so that it can be done at the same time as the game imagery. It is likely though that some of the game imagery will be pushed back, until after some of the Actionscripting has been done.

Work done, week 3 26 July - 1 Aug;

contact.php - The PHP for the contact page was done. The contact page will contain an email form, as well as an email link.

editprofile.php - The edit profile page PHP was completed. On this page users will be able to edit their country, sex, and about me sections, which appear on their profile.

editaccount.php - The edit account page will allow users to change their registered email address and password.

profile.php - The profile page will display the profile of the selected user.

functions.php - This page contains certain php functions that are called from some pages.

userbar.php – The XHTML was done for this section of the page.

header.php – This page was done, contains the website header.

footer.php – The footer was done, contains menu links and copyright information.

format.css – The CSS for the menu, and some of the footer was completed.

Image holders – Image holders were done, these are made to the size of the images so they can be placed on the site.

There have been no problems up to this stage of the project.

This is what the index page looks like at this stage.

Will

Week 2 - Working on the PHP

The second week of the project was spent working on the PHP programming for the website.

Work done, week 2, 19-25 July;

signup.php - This page allows users to sign up to the site, choosing a username and password.

confirm.php - This page is used to activate users membership to the site, throught a link that is emailed to them.

sessions.php - This page is inlcuded on pages where the user is required to be logged in. It checks if the user is logged on and if not redirects them to the login page, otherwise it allows them to continue.

login.php - This is where members login to there accounts.

logout.php - This is where logged in members can log out.

highscores.php - This page displays the highscores list for the game. It only shows a limited amount of scores per page and splits the rest onto other pages.

The PHP programming will be finished hopefully on Monday the 28th of July, which is ahead of schedule of the currently set date of 1st August.

There were no problems faced this week.

The only new knowledge gained this week is that PHP if and else statements do not required '{' and '}' when only being a single line of actions. I do not like this though as it means that the code is inconsistent in its look so I have put them in anyway.

Will

Week 1 - Starting the website

This is the first entry for my blog about my major project.

My major project is a Flash game called Beer Defender. There will also be a website built with PHP and utilising a MySQL database.

There is fourteen weeks to do the project, there is also two weeks holidays in there somewhere, but they don't count, because they're for holidays not work.

Work done during week 1, 14-18 July;

Database tables created - On phpMyAdmin, as well as code stored in text document for backup or if required elsewhere.

index.php - Made the index page for the site, with includes for other pages required, bdconnection, header, menu, userbar, footer, and CSS.

bdconnection.php - Contains all the information required to connection to the database, as well as the tables names in the database stored as variables so they can easily be changed.

userbar.php - Wrote the PHP for the userbar page, which displays different information depending on weather the user is logged in or not.

menu.php - Made the menu page for the Main menu using XHTML

format.css - Started doing the main css page, put in some basic code to give the site the rough shape. Using different background colours to clearly identify different sections of the page.

Will