Lost Files and Improving Functionality
This week, the class got to meet with the Iohahi:io students to get an update on the progress of this project. It was really helpful to know where they stood on having certain aspects implemented and what we were both willing to compromise in order to make this project as great as it can be. Our group is on the right track and we will be continuing to work in order to have everything ready by our beta presentation.
Challenges
The challenge I had this week was every programmer's nightmare...losing all your files. I was slightly disorganized while working on this project and because I didn't name my files properly, they ended up being overwritten by an older version of another project. I tried everything I could to see if I could recover the old version, but since I had no backups, there was pretty much nothing I could do. While it was sad to see most of my progress go down the drain, I took this as an opportunity to make this new version as clean and efficient as possible in terms of coding. Much of the code that I had previously was very scattered and hard to track. This time, I started off from scratch and implemented only the functions I needed. It's safe to say that the version I have now is much better than what I had in the past, and did not take as long to replicate on top of adding new functions.
Successes
Despite the challenge this week, I had a large success in getting about 80% of our land functionalities in place. I was able to get a better visual for our basket UI as well as get a gradual change from a day to night sky. I also added some visual feedback and animation for when the user collects an object to indicate when they will be ready to move on to the next scene. Throughout this project so far, I would say I got the most done this week compared to previous weeks and this project is looking brighter and brigher. By having all the interactions ready at least for one time period gives us the ease to simply copy and paste for the remaining time periods, with some adjustments such as the basket inventory.
Below is a clip of the user interactions on land. This version is a sped-up for the sake of video timing but will be made slower in the final product.
Next Steps
The next step for me is to fine-tune these functionalities so they look visually pleasing. This includes colour and animation adjustment to make sure things are flowing smoothly. I also need to re-develop the inventory system since I had lost it in my previous files. Thankfully, I have a good start by pseudo-coding how the functionality would be implemented, hopefully, it'll be as easy as I picture in my head. The last thing for the land interactions would be an animation or a transition to change from one webpage to another. I have some code already that forces the user to switch webpages on command, but I need to work on implementing it so that it is not as abrupt. For now, I'm looking to make it a fade-in and fade-out animation from the web pages, with the possibility of improvements later on.
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