As of now the player can fire small pellets and will get a time bonus from hitting an enemy with these projectiles. I did this by creating a new p5.play Group for the bullets; each time the player presses one of the firing keys, a new Sprite is created, with a set velocity on the x-axis, and added to the group; the group then checks collisions with walls, to disappear, and with enemies, to remove both elements from the game and reduce the timer/increase the score for the player’s run.
firepower… by Hans Splinter on Flickr under a CC License.
The rest of the team worked on: keeping the score saving screen within the P5 canvas, in a retro style four-character toggler; level design aids, to run a custom level within the current game engine.
I will further report on next week’s work once we assign issues across the team.
OK. This time I’ll deliver on the projectiles. We needed to fix some other stuff before, so I didn’t focus on the projectiles. I’ll develop the collisions regarding these projectiles and how they factor into the score.
This week’s end marked, as well, the ending of the second sprint of It’s not raining. As of now, our game has two levels, and a leaderboard. The main focus of this sprint was having a GUI, and more organized coding. We achieved both with the help of one of p5‘s recomended libraries called p5.SceneManager developed by Marian Veteanu.
Factory Theatre by Kayla Jane Barrie on Flickr under a CC License.
The aim of this library is to modularize p5‘s sketch into multiple sketches called scenes, this is done in order to have a more organized structure for a p5 sketch, this helps a lot in game development. Before, we abstracted levels into JSONs to deal with multiple levels, but what if we wanted to just show the score, or have a menu, we would have had to forgo all gameplay aspects of our abstracted code to stop the time from ticking, and reset the setup of our sketch to show a whole nother screen. That’s the main issue scenes tackle, different screens that can’t be abstracted into the same blob, scenes proud themselves in being able to abstract these.
Using this library we were able to easily develop a leaderboard and a menu. Now, we’re just hoping Gerardo gets us pizza for behaving and not starting a mutiny. Yet.
This week I’ll be starting the implementation of a projectile in It’s not raining, as our flame spirit may require this skill to complete certain levels and for us to make newer levels with this game-mechanic in mind.
I’ll also be making a leaderboard for people to be able to see their scores. On regards to the management of the project, we’ve now kind of adapted to delivering by Sunday and plan on Monday to start development right after planning or on Tuesday.
It all started with wanting to store scores, and we did that, but also migrated our database from mLab to MongoDB‘s cloud service Atlas, and let me introduce Mongoose in case you haven’t heard of it, it’s object modeling for MongoDB, you define a Model as a Schema that includes typing and provides an easy query-building interface and validation against these Models. We switched from raw handling MongoDB interactions to using Mongoose’s Schemas. From Mongoose’s documentation page:
Each schema maps to a MongoDB collection and defines the shape of the documents within that collection.
With this new implementation we let Mongoose handle interactions with our MongoDB instance.
Heading South by Putneypics on Flickr under a CC License.
In other news, we have a second level ready and uploaded, and score storing is almost done.
Everyone’s on the payroll nowadays, even hackers. Like legit payroll, no more 1337 money for hackers. Ethical Hacking consists in exploiting any existing vulnerability in a system—usually that in some way accesses the network—through intrusion to verify and evaluate their physical and logical security. The idea is to prove that a system is vulnerable and where they are, so the organization that owns the system can take the appropriate preventive measures against attacks exploiting them.
Now don’t panic, ethical hackers or white hat hackers perform this penetration or intrusion tests in a controlled environment, trying to think as the attackers in order to find exploits in security, kind of undercover geeks . . . please don’t hack me.
Reese, Hacker by Donnie Ray Jones on Flickr under a CC License.
How Can I Become One of These White Knights?!
Since, as an official ethical hacker, you’d be finding confidential information hanging around the exploits, your employers will be asking to see some kind of credentials before allowing you to poke around their systems without restriction. The response to who do you think you are? when making this type of proposition is to flaunt around some information security certifications.
To officially get the Ethical Hacker title, I suggest the Certified Ethical Hacking Certification from the EC-Council (International Council of Electronic Commerce Consultants)—primarily a professional certification body, also the orchestrator of a series of information security conferences and EC-University.
The purpose of this certification is detailed in their page:
Establish and govern minimum standards for credentialing professional information security specialists in ethical hacking measures.
Inform the public that credentialed individuals meet or exceed the minimum standards.
Reinforce ethical hacking as a unique and self-regulating profession.
Certifications are a nice way of going pro, as they help regulate professionals by providing employers with a base-knowledge that someone with that certificate has, these Certified Ethical Hackers should, in-theory, come with this basis out-of-the-box; for the certificated it serves as credentials, to back up the claims of granditude that tend to run amok in people’s CVs.
This week in It’s not raining we’ll be focusing on wrapping up the sprint’s milestone, by saving to the database the player’s score. What we’ll be doing is test the integration of the branches, and playtest to find any bug that may be hiding under a rock.
This past week we worked on new levels, progressing through them, storing them locally and fixing some bugs. On Tuesday we had a small review with our professor, Ken, to see how we were going; both parties ended up agreeing we were doing fine, but should delegate a bit more of the responsibilities that pertain to the project.
Meeting by Rikard Wallin on Flickr under a CC License.
Onto the deliverables
We generalized text elements to be included in the JSON representation of the map, to not include hardcoded text server-side. We fixed some problem we had with flags messing up the end-of-level and kept the player from progressing to the next level. Now we store the JSONed level in a global variable to reload the level browser-side whenever the player fails to complete the level and falls victim to a cruel trap put there by us, yes, us, the developers who inherently despise them. But hey, the server receives less requests now
This week we’ll be developing the web application’s integration with a database. What the database will contain is the design of the levels as a JSON—by storing the coordinates of each element by groups—and the leaderboard of scores associated to a named user—maybe with an arcade style 4-letter select-screen. Because inside It’s not raining we’re dealing directly with JSONs, our database will have the same format.
Arcade by Jared Zimmerman on Flickr under a CC License.
mLab
As of now we’re thinking of using MongoDB as our database, and we found mLab to be our best option for hosting a MongoDB instance, as it is hosted as-a-service and it has a pretty juicy free-tier offer.
And some more stuff . . .
There are some bugs that need fixing and in-game progress that needs to be reflected by advancing to another level after reaching the goal (yep, this still isn’t done, but it wasn’t really part of the core of the game).
This past week was our first delivery, we reached the first milestone of the project, and with it, the first sprint came to an end. This milestone consisted of having a playable demo of the game, with basic physics, an enemy, a goal, structures—walls, floor— and a level loader. Most of these are self explanatory, except, maybe, for the level loader. The focus of this was to receive a JSON object specifying the location of the structures, the enemies, the goal and the player for a level loader method to receive and upon which build the level.
Power Sprint by Kenneth Barker on Flickr under a CC License.
In regards to management, we’re getting used to using the issue tab in our Github repository to keep track of who’s doing what, and are trying to chip in the comments for suggestions and clarification. In the Gitflow front, we’ve secured the branch master so that it has the latest fully playable version of the project and no one can mess with it without having their mess approved by another member of the team.
Contrary to popular belief, we are not planning a mutiny, Gerardo.
