Week 9 Day 7 - GitHub Troubles & Abilities

This week we hit some problems with GitHub.  Zach commited his first change, and we were nearly unable to merge the commit.  It appears that Git doesn't do things nearly as simply when it hits conflicts in files.  We spent half of Saturday trying to get his changes into the system.  They are in there, but we are unsure exactly how we did it.  Our continued usage of GitHub is currently in question.  If we are going to have this much trouble with solving file conflicts, we may go back to SVN, as it worked quite simply there.

In less exciting news, the storing of teams was altered, to more easily accommodate grabbing the Team color or name.  Some odds and ends bugs were fixed with the display of the Score menu.  The side view camera is now implemented and working.  There is a known issue of the camera falling through objects when pointed straight up in the air (falling through platforms, we need to test if it still does this for other objects).  We'd also like the add the ability to swap the camera to the other side of the player dynamically in the game, now that it is no longer centered (This really shouldn't take more than an hour or two to accomplish).

We are down to 2 weeks before Alpha 2, and are getting a little bit behind on schedule.  We hoped to have 2 columns of abilities implemented by this coming test, however have not focused our efforts directly on those columns.  We will need to step it up this next week if we hope to have 2 columns completed in time.

The current ability chart is as follows:

	Light Role	Support (Builder) Role	Heavy Role
Attack-based Ability	Cone Push* (coned area)	Box Drop* (from sky)	Area Push* (area around player)
Defensive-based Ability	Blink* (Straight up)	Create Wall*	Steal Weight
Movement-based Ability	Roll (possibly ignore other abilities while rolling)	Grapple (like a grappling hook)	Ram (run forward and push other players out of the way)
Ultimate (and probably imbalanced) Ability	***	Destroy Platform	Ground Slam
Passive Ability	1/2 Dash Cooldown	Aura that lowers cooldowns for nearby players	Weight Gain

*These abilities are implemented currently
*** This ability is still in consideration.  We are trying out one of the following possibilities:

• Gravity Toggle - allows the player to not be effected by gravity while activated (Right now they can toggle this on and off, that will probably change)
• Rocket (fires a projectile rocket that applies a large force on the player it hits, or maybe an explosive force around the location it hits)

Week 8 Day 7 - Individual Scoring and Pre-Alpha 2

We spent the other day coming up with a system for individual scoring and awarding points to people who get "kills".  Every time a player gets hit by an ability, the caster of that ability is added to a list, along with a time stamp.  When a player dies, the last player to hit him is awarded a kill point.  Every other player in that list is awarded an assist point.  Players in the list with a time-stamp within the last five seconds are only awarded points.  We are also keeping track of the amount of times players die, so that any player can review his/her performance after every game.

We have implemented a few abilities but most still haven't been worked on.  We are still discussing if we are going to change some of the abilities from the previous table we posted.

We still need to work on changing the camera from a top perspective to a side perspective, along with a follow camera while someone is waiting to respawn.