Despite being completely absent for the last year, I was wondering if there were plans to do another collab (Game Jam) sometime in the future? I would make myself available if so. Might have a second taker that would be interested in focusing on adding sound effects as well.

-Brett

I had a great time and enjoyed the game jam. I think we did really well. I was quite surprised how far the game went.

-Brett

Here's a quick clip of what we got accomplished. I'm very proud of our work!

My initial plan was just to have an array of points(Vec2's?) the user has clicked (or touched) on to represent the user's input. It wouldn't necessarily be a curve or a line. When it's time to render, the points are just drawn to the screen as a set of discreet 'pixels' or small 'spheres'. I hadn't envisioned have a separate method for lines or anything like that. Going this route, we can represent whatever actual shape the user enters without having a bunch of methods to try and render different lines or curves. The letters the user has selected would simply be added to the 'wordInProgress:wordEntry' object as the point passes the boundary of that particular letter. The cool thing is, we don't have to be very precise here. As long as the user hits some point inside the letter it can get added. The other part is, this path will also allow the player to 'unspell' words if they follow the path they just made, but in reverse. The only thing we will need to watch out for will be duplicate entries and overflow if we're using polling. May get past this making a simple event that registers new motion.

As for the inputManager, this is where interfaces will shine. Instead of having an inputManager with the separate subclasses we simply implement one iController that is Mouse and one that is Touch. The gameState would have an inputManager which would track whichever iController is in use at the time and they could be switched out instantly by setting it to either Mouse or Touch. The cool thing with using the interface model is that later on say we decided we want to add a joystick controller… we don't have to rewrite the inputManager or gameState, we simply code the joystick interface and it will be accepted as a iController by the whole system.

So basically, the gameState would have a method. Let's say: processInput. The gameState would create an instance of the mouse controller and the touch controller, and then assign that as an event delegate to (all input controllers) the controller. Once input has occurred, the controller will simple raise the method and gameState will process the input (by adding the newly returned Vec2 to it's internal array of userInput)

It may sound a little complex, but really it won't be that bad.

Removing the board from the team was/is funny. It was the very first thing I saw this morning and caused a bit of freaking out on my part because I couldn't find it at all. Had to follow the forum link just to find it, but I got the team assigned to it again.

Just repeating below some things I fleshed out on Discord.

My wife downloaded Word Cookie on her phone, so I was playing it a little bit. It looks like a bezier curve of some kind is drawn between the first letter you touch and the current location you drag to. I'd like to simplify that to just drawing a line for now. It should be easy to just poll the mouse or touch screen for the current position to determine where the line is being drawn. I think there is some capability to vector draw rays in MonoGame. I think we can look at that to draw lines between letters unless people have a different preference.

It looks like drawing simple lines in MonoGame is not an option. What do you guys feel about an extension method like this for starters?

public static class SpriteBatchExtensionMethods { public static void DrawLine(this SpriteBatch spriteBatch, Vector2 lineStart, Vector2 lineEnd, Color color, int width = 1) { Texture2D pixel = new Texture2D(spriteBatch.GraphicsDevice, 1, 1); pixel.SetData<Color>(new Color[] { color }); Rectangle rectangle = new Rectangle((int)lineStart.X, (int)lineStart.Y, (int)(lineEnd - lineStart).Length() + width, width); Vector2 vectorNormal = Vector2.Normalize(lineStart - lineEnd); float angle = (float)Math.Acos(Vector2.Dot(vectorNormal, -Vector2.UnitX)); if (lineStart.Y > lineEnd.Y) angle = MathHelper.TwoPi - angle; spriteBatch.Draw(pixel, rectangle, null, color, angle, Vector2.Zero, SpriteEffects.None, 0); } }

Using the extension method in practice:

protected override void Draw(GameTime gameTime) { GraphicsDevice.Clear(Color.CornflowerBlue); spriteBatch.Begin(); spriteBatch.DrawLine(new Vector2(15, 15), new Vector2(90, 95), Color.Black, 5); spriteBatch.DrawLine(new Vector2(100, 38), new Vector2(300, 38), Color.Orange, 12); spriteBatch.End(); base.Draw(gameTime); }

I'd like to see us design an InputManager class that contains two sub-classes. A MouseManager and a TouchPadManager. Then our Controller can reference the InputManager that will handle farming the input poll to either touchscreen or mouse. I'm up for other models as well depending on what people want.

I'm happy to focus on the TouchPadManager for starts (or most of the input code).

-Brett

I've got no complaints about the space theme. If anybody's ever looked at my past work, you would quickly come to know that I gravitate towards space stuff. (Heh. I even used the word "gravitate".) So space is absolutely fine by me.

But I wonder if there isn't a different theme that might be a better fit for the word unscrambling theme.

As a thought, what about like a hacker theme, where you're unscrambling words to hack into things? As though it were user names and passwords. The game mechanics would be identical, just an art style that is more cyber/digital style than space.

As I said, the theme really doesn't matter at all to me, and based on the wide number of games of this exact same style that I'm now seeing on the store, it's pretty clear that this game can work with any kind of theme we want. Including space. Just putting the idea out there.

I cannot seem to make additions or edits to the Trello board. Could you up my permissions.

I'd like to see the cards separated into smaller tasks. For example, adding sound and music to the game are currently the same task where I think these should be separate tasks.

A lot of the cards represent large sections of the game instead of being discrete tasks.

-Brett

One of the things I wanted to have done before the official start was at least some basic artwork. A background, some letters. I'll be getting to that here in a bit but while I was looking around for some stuff to steal, I came across a version of this game called Letter Soup: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.candywriter.apollo7&hl=en. Oddly enough it's almost exactly how I pictured Alphabet Soup. That being said, I don't like it. Lol.

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing horrible about it or anything. The graphics even look eerily similar to what I made last night for a bowl of tomato soup. I didn't like those, and I don't like these overall. I just think a different motif would serve us better. So, as BDFD I've decided to go in a different direction.

And what better trope to fall back to than space? I've always liked stuff that was a little more visually engaging… parallax backgrounds, the odd candle flickering in the background, a creepy vine or snake slithering by off in the distance somewhere. So without going into all of that, we could do some simple stars flying by on top of any number of other space backgrounds and have a fairly decent look I believe.

Maybe we'll figure out a new name later.

So, that is the plan for the moment. If you have any ideas, thoughts, or comments, now would be the time to get them in!

I'll be off exploring the stars for some artwork to steal .. .

Just thought I'd throw that in, it's sort of an important aspect and something we need to include. At least the part about drawing a line through and to the letters. I'll try to remember to get this included in tonights update as well as getting some more work done on the Trello board so we'll have a nice workload ready to go in the morning!

Take care all, good luck, and we'll see you soon!

Haven't heard anything about anyone volunteering for artwork at this point. I actually spent some time last night trying to create a 'bowl of tomato soup' where the letters would 'float' up to the top for selection, but I couldn't get things looking the way I wanted. Been quite a while since I did any artwork, lol. At any rate, thats mostly background stuff so I'm sure we can figure something out. I'm going to spend a little while tonight giving it another shot.

I was planning on using renderings of letters vs. rendering in game. Although, either would be fine as long as we hit the end goal. The trello board linked above has a basic outline of where things stand at the moment, and will probably get some more updates this evening. In that, I reference cooltext.com as a place to get pre-rendered letters. They do an amazing job with text and have a ton of options so I'm sure we could make something from there work.

Over the last couple days I have been hitting the sack fairly early. I have to be up around 6AM to make it to the new job on time, so my Discord attendance has been sporadic at best. And, even when I am on I'm usually marked as offline or hidden because I've been torn between several things at once and trying not to get drawn into sitting and chatting for several hours. You can always ping me in a PM/DM and if I'm around, I'll definitely get back with you. I do check in several times a day, even from work so I will get any messages you leave there for me.

-Brett

Do you envision the player having to select each letter in order for the word, or does order not matter?

Did anyone volunteer to help with the artwork? Are you thinking of using renders of letters or rendering letters for gameplay from a font? If we are using a font, have we thought of which one yet?

I've been logging onto Discord the last couple of evenings, but it must be too late for everyone else as I don't see you or RB on to talk about the project.

-Brett

I wanted to get a good start on this collab, and although I haven't made it as far as I had anticipated, it's not bad for a 48 hour countdown.

Here's our Trello board: https://trello.com/b/V7AQVkD3/alphabet-soup-word-cookies-clone

I may have to invite you to the team or set some permissions or something, so if you can't get in DM me on discord or post here. I'll hook it up.

Design docs coming in a bit once I get the meatloaf in the oven…