1. As I mentioned in my previous posts, I’m currently trying to settle on a topic for my honours project. Updates to my (at least weekly, as it’s a requirement of the module) blog on that subject will be found here.
    
2. http://killercodingninjabunny.com now redirects to http://hazelmckendrick.com rather than the other way around. Hopefully all previous links should still work, but please let me know if there’s a problem.
    
3. There are now 350 approved comments on the site – thanks to everyone who has left feedback or advice! It is greatly appreciated.
    
4. Finally, videos of YinYangYou are available on my youtube channel. Here’s a sample:

So, thanks again to everyone who has contributed or helped me along the way. This is by far the longest I’ve managed to keep a blog for and I feel I’m really improving in terms of writing posts which benefit me as a programmer.

Image thanks to Dave Morris.

These four videos show a complete playthough of the level.

Don’t forget you can check out our other videos on our youtube channel.

Even though we only recorded it a week ago, it feels like a lot has changed in the game. If you’re in Edinburgh around the 14th to the 16th of August, you can come check out Pollen and all the Dare to be Digital games.

It’s a playthrough of the opening and tutorial section of the game, intended to introduce the player to the controls as well as each type of bee and their abilities.

Things we’ve learned from creating a tutorial:

• There’s more to having multiple input methods than just implementing support for different hardware.
• If you give players big arrows as hints, you need to remove them gradually or people panic.
• It’s good to give people an area to practice (lots of rocks, a few mushrooms) but unless there’s an incentive (like pollen) they probably won’t bother.
• Nobody reads text.
• Audio cues make a huge difference, even if they are subtle.
• Experienced players need to be able to skip or get through the tutorial quickly, or it’s frustrating.
• There’s always a way to break the tutorial you haven’t thought of yet.

If you have any advice on how we can tighten this area up, make it less confusing, or on creating great tutorials in general we’d love to hear from you!

Here’s the second Pollen progress video, recorded towards the end of week 4 (so around a week ago). Although it doesn’t reflect the state the game is in now
(more assets, better controls, better motions and animations for each bee type) it’s a huge jump from the first video we shared. It shows a basic walkthrough of our level, and how the different bees can be used. Since then, the level has been tweaked (ie made less brutal), we’ve added a tutorial, the tunnel section looks less like it “is from the movie Saw” (Ian’s description) and we’ve started work on our scary boss battle.

Obviously the game is still far from finished, so we’ve got a lot of room to change and adjust it. If you have any feedback or suggestions, we’d love to hear them.

Just a short video to demonstrate how the different bee types in the game are used together in the game, and give some idea of how your swarm is controlled. At this stage we’ve got our level blocked out and are working on adding art assets and refining each obstacle, making sure they play well and are… y’know… actually fun.

Apart from that, right now I’m just focussing on XNA and C# in preparation for Dare, and trying to decide upon a topic for my dissertation.

You can see the program layering the octaves of Simplex Noise here, going from large, gradual slopes to finer surface noise. Colours are now blended as well instead of just popping in at certain points, and at the end the whole terrain is smoothed. As the water and terrain are constantly in motion, normals have to be calculated each frame which is fairly processor intensive. However, since this video was captured I’ve switched over to using vertex buffer objects which has made a noticeable difference to the frame rate, and almost all the remaining changes I have to make relate to the graphics card, so hopefully the demo will remain at about 30fps on the target platform.

Here’s a taster, one of two Playstation 2 demos: