By Ali Maggs – Co-Creator and Programmer
Work on Timedancer Episode 2 continues!
My job, for the past week, and over the next couple of weeks, is to create the in-game puzzles… In the meantime, our post-production team continues editing, adding special effects, and designing the 3D environments.
The plan, time wise, is that I’ll be working almost exclusively on the puzzles until the last week of post-production when all of the video elements, 3D environments and copy text will be slotted into place around the stuff I’ve already coded.
Timedancer episode 2 has four puzzles, so I’m aiming to hit one a week here… I completed the first one on Saturday…
Going back to the plan which we sketched out (right), I’ve been developing the idea of a combination game to work as a “lock” buzzle for one of the 3D environments in the game…. The idea being that you have to unlock the gates to one of the environments by solving a combination puzzle… So this puzzle is “Page 25” on the schematic, and comes on one of the four final threads. The puzzle code is split between XAML and C# and involves a grid where the user needs to make a connection from one point to the other by rotating the cells of the grid… As should be the case in Silverlight, the style is being handled by the XAML, whilst C# takes care of the actual mechanics.
For anybody wanting to know the mechanics – it’s pretty simple in theory – What I’ve done, for simplicity, is created a variable for each square of the grid… These variables store the rotated position of the object (stored in degrees from 0-359 – 360 is converted to 0). I’ve then assigned a button to each square, which controls the square… It calls a function in C# which adds 90 degrees to the square, stores its new variable, then rotates the square. Then there’s a check function that loops through the squares to make sure they’re rotated to the correct position and, if they all match, allows the user to move on…
It’s a little tricky to see it, visually, as – right now – I’m just testing it with white squares, but this will look like a puzzle with pipes over the next few days – the idea being to connect all the pipes from start to finish to make a continuous flowing pipe.
I reckon this might make a smart little standalone game actually…
Random stats from Saturday…
Listening to: Starsailor, Noah & The Whales, R.E.M.
Cups of Coffee: 7 
Lunch break: Chicken, Mozzerella and Parma Ham Panini (at Coco)
Aliens spotted: 0