GROUP FINAL PROJECT
BENCHMARK 3
In this benchmark you will further extend your game, adding all game sprites with AI, as well as adding sound & music. At the end of this assignment, you should have something that works like the final game you imagined. You'll then have the remaining week and a half to improve gameplay. You should progress as follows:
- Artificial Intelligence: Game sprites should now be added to all levels, and teams should setup a system for implementing AI. Each level should demonstrate bots with AI behavior, whether it is simply pattern based, or something more complex like behavioral models or pathfinding. Again, note that the gameplay expectations for this project are considerably higher than for the individual projects, and that AI is certainly an important factor in good gameplay.
- Level Cheats: provide cheats in your game to shortcut to a level at any time. This will help you in development & testing, and the TA with grading. CTRL-1 should immediately advance the game to level 1, CTRL-2 should go to level 2, etc. CTRL-I should make the main player invincible temporarily to help with testing. You should consider additional cheats as well that will help with game testing.
- Game Sound: record all necessary sound effects for your game and incorporate them into your game. Remember, sound effects may not be lifted from Internet sources. You must produce all sounds yourself. Sounds are to signify important events (like collisions) on & off screen (as you see fit). Again, I recommend using an easy to use, free tool like Audacity, but you're welcome to use other tools as well. As far as incorporating sound into your game, you may use any mechanism you like, including XACT, XAudio, DirectSound, fmod, or even DirectMusic (though it's deprecated). Of all these technologies, I would say DirectSound is likely the easiest to setup and use but the others are more capable.
- Level Music: lift whatever music you like from whatever source you like (though recording original music on Audacity isn't too hard) and incorporate it into your game such that each level uses different music to set the mood. You may, of course, use multiple pieces of music on a given level.
A LOOK AHEAD
For the final demo, groups will complete their game and present it to the instructor and TA.
GO AHEAD TO FINAL DEMO
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by Richard McKenna