The latest

At this point, I have a file format defined that will control the flow of the game. It's based on the music, so you can define Background sounds that will play at a certain time and for a certain length, and then you can define Riffs which will transition to the battle mode and allow the player to play the notes. When the riff is over, it transitions back to the LEVEL state and play continues.

Things that need to be done (in no particular order):

1. Fix timing issue - there's a slight timing issue somewhere that's causing the music to become out of sync with my code after it loops a whole bunch of times. I have some ideas of what may be causing this, so hopefully I can track it down today. UPDATE: fixed on the dual core really fast machines in the lab, but it still gets out of sync on my laptop. I know a way to force a fix for this but I'm not going to implement it right now, maybe a bit later. Fixed, basically I handle looping on my own based on my own timer.

2. Riff Input for Multiple Key presses - so it plays more like guitar hero (ie, holding down the first note while hitting the second note doesn't cause you to miss a the second note) Also, riff input for chords. Feb 9th 2:15pm Done

3. Fix Menu transition timings - transitioning to the menu screws up timing in the battle mode at the moment, it's probably as simple as telling the riff and music to pause on outtro.

4. Note Display - the notes are just lines of color at the moment, which makes for difficult play if you forget the order of the colors. We're thinking of stacking them ala guitar hero. We need to figure out what we want the notes to actually look like, too. Also, we were talking about adding some cool effects to the notes, like some cool particles or something.

5. Character Animation State Machine - we need a nice state pattern for character animation, right now it's just kinda start and stop.

6. Score Class - we probably want a way to keep score, or something along those lines, so a nice singleton score class with methods like hitNote, missedNote, etc will probably work well. All Done! Includes guitar hero style multiplier and the ability to see how well the player performed on previous riffs, so we can tell if they learned them or not for the HUD.

7. LEVEL gameplay - we need some sort of gameplay in the LEVEL state. Chris and I discussed the possibility of a sidescroller shooter, where you have to shoot different colored notes at the enemies to kill them. This is probably going to be more work than we're expecting, so we should start on this asap. We're going to need things like an enemy class and bullet class, etc.

8. CONTENT - music, art. nuff said.

9. End Game? - what's going to happen when you finish the game? how's it going to end? we're not going to have enough time to implement a boss most likely, unless we throw a bunch of our already created features together to simulate a boss fight.

10. Menus

11. System Config checks - does your video card support our game? how much texture memory are we going to require, etc.

12. A way to get particle systems into the world without hard coding them - preferably a way that we can put them in the world using the world builder.

13. HUD

So, it's the end of week 8, we've got a week and a half left til milestone 3, and my other classes are starting to get pretty crazy. It's going to be an interesting next few weeks =)