Deven Bloggerson: Completing a Season
Notice!
Big milestone hit: I am the first person in sports history to complete a full season of Super Slam Dunk Touchdown. The semifinals and finals seem to be working as designed, though more testing is needed. The game now tracks who won the semifinal 1 match, uses this information to set up the semifinal 2 match, and places the two winners in the semifinal match. The win-loss records are still tracked at the moment, which led to some confusion when one of the top four teams dropped out of the top four after the semifinals. This should be an easy fix though, just don’t track win/loss after the main season games.
The AI is fighting at its CPUiest, and victory felt pretty good. The difficulty will still get some tweaking, but my goal is that becoming season champion is no cakewalk. However, beating the season is a bit anti-climactic at the moment because….
No Endings
The game needs an ending! Actually it needs like 11 or something, but first things first. I am now working on a cutscene system: nothing fancy, just a gameplay scene where there’s no player control and I can script some events. Events should include any number of things from Coach Clip talking, earning a trophy, to triggering the start of a new season in the case of endings.
My next milestone goal is to get a basic season in a demo-ready form to solicit player feedback on things like difficulty and engagement. This means getting a few basic endings in place from the various end conditions:
- Season champions
- Made finals, lost
- Made semifinals, lost
- Did not make semifinals
After the ending, a new season should start up with the same player team.
Other Things
In addition to major Season Mode additions, I’m fixing bugs along the way. I noticed this one a while back:
It seemed like the icon colors were wrong for at least one color set, but after correcting them in the code, they still aren’t right — and for a different reason I haven’t determined:
Additionally, I found a bug with the joystick timing out when mousing around the Team HQ screen. It turns out it has to do with my flight stick not having a controller definition. Even though the joystick has input, if I assign a controller map to it without the controller definition, it stops working on this screen and is always timed out.
This is kinda weird because joysticks should get a default map if there isn’t one defined. I’m not sure if it’s a flight stick problem or what. While I took the opportunity to add a lot more controller definitions, this is a PC version problem so I didn’t want to get too bogged down in it. Xbox One is still the priority right now.
Oops
Speaking of, I haven’t tested the build on the Xbox One in a few weeks, which is usually a good way to introduce a bunch of Xbox One bugs. I shouldn’t let that slip too far off the radar but I do want a demoable season mode ASAP, even if it only works on PC for the time being. I’ll see how far I can get with the basic endings and circle back around with an Xbox One build. Until then, stay sportsy!