Let’s continue with our weekly update!
Francisco (Programmer): this week I’ve been working on keeping track of the players progress as they play Breaking Fast. Obviously, Breaking Fast will ship with several selectable characters, stages and tournaments, but there will be more of these that can be unlocked as players play races. In order to unlock new items, players use experience points that they build up over time. So basically, the most important information that we must store is these experience points as well as the unlocked items. As part of this logic, of course, we need to ensure that players only can see (and select) the selectable items available up to that point. This is mainly achieved with a file that is created the first time the game launches and that is updated as soon as something important changes. For the settings file (and others), I use this wonderful JSON lua library for encoding and decoding the information, but the progress is so simple that I created my own format which is faster to read and write. The following screenshot shows an excerpt of the progress manager, which reads and writes to a progress.data file.
Oliver (Musician): this week I had to prepare a workshop about video games audio, so I couldn’t focus much on Breaking Fast.......... Nonetheless, I continued the song for the parisian café level and I finished up the last eight sound effects :)
Manuela (Artist): given that Breaking Fast is going to be distributed on Steam, during last week I have been creating the Steam trading cards, as well as the badges, emoticons and backgrounds that come with them. The production of the backgrounds has been specially challenging, as the design guidelines of Steam indicate that they should not use very bright colors, and the art of Breaking Fast is specially bright! However, I think that you are going to like the final result... But you'll have to wait until Breaking Fast is finally out!
David (Online programmer): this week I've been focusing on fixing some bugs with the flow of entering/leaving a lobby and handling some edge cases, online programming is so much fun... yaaay... Also, I've been polishing all the gameplay elements you will find in the offline mode, making sure everything is synchronized across the network and that clients keep in sync, something really tricky with Breaking Fast as the game pace is incredibly fast. After the first online testing sessions the game seems to behave quite well, so hopefully you will have the same great and fun experience in both the offline and online modes!
The following video shows part of one of the online test sessions we carried out:
