This is a progress log of  all things coding related, not a lot outside of that will be covered as besides that in the ideation part we were just trying to cut back on ideas and rework this 4 player party game into a single player romp, so not a very detailed path but more a long back and forth which left us with our original game idea.

Checkpoint 1 after we'd chosen roles I received some rough place holder sprites and I  imported them into GameMaker. This was my first time coding besides the previous in class tutorials so by the end of the week I had objects with sprites assigned to them and a walking code which crashed on me. In retrospect this was more so a period for me to get familiar with GameMaker and it eased me into it.

Checkpoint 2 was when the coding started coming along and was also when the first logic issue in the game appeared. Before class I managed to get the gravity variant set up so that when you are no meeting the ground the roach will fall, got the movement to let you forward and back (using an equation where it does left key - right key = movdirection which then sets which way you go), and made it so your x movement would be set to 0 when meeting with a wall so wouldn't walk right pass them, later in class I got some help and coded the cockroach turning around depending on which direction it faced. For as functional as this sounds a lot of issues were seen here in the rough version such as the floor collision not working when falling from above it but working when spawned on it working just fine and if you scooched up to the wall you'd get stuck. The way which these were fixed was via creating an if statement for the wall which checked if you were attempting to walk into or away from it (as well as changing its collision into a thinner box) and with gravity it was because the way I coded it meant that it was turning on the default "gravity" function in GameMaker on instead of utilizing the Yspeed which was set up prior, this meant that even with an if statement to set it back the floor wasn't gonna stop the falling, this was changed via creation a grav variable which would work on Yspeed however as a universal statement in every object which had gravity "if place_meeting (x, y, collision_box) {yspeed = 0}" was placed which then would stop the roach in it's place. Checkpoint 2 was the stage setting part where now that I understood GameMaker a bit more I'd start fighting to get the code to work as invisioned.

Checkpoint 3 was when the crew made a lot of the sprites you see now in game but for me this was my smash my head against a wall until it broke phase. I fixed the movement to be faster yet not so fast you feel like the game is rushing, all the collision fixes I detailed above were done throughout Checkpoint 2 and into the start of Checkpoint 3 and now I'd started on the trickiest part of the game, throw-able objects. To take my devlog straight from the checkpoint 3 journal "I got the interact-able object working, now when you approach it and hold a button it gets put onto the roach's back. It follows the same movement logic while you're holding the button down as the roach so you can move sideways and it stays ontop of the roach. Currently I am figuring out how to make the object get thrown at an arch and then collide with objects. I've got it's downwards movement down but now I need to create logic for it flying forward and for it to not go through the floor/walls. Once I get this code down I'll be able to reuse it for the fly and the poop which will get most of the puzzles done with the only other thing needed being adding the lose state of the spider web and the interaction of the fly touching the spider web and you being able to afterwards walk through it." When I said it follows the same movement logic what I meant is that it checks if the cockroach is meeting the object and if the "Z" button is being pressed and if both come back as true it runs the same code as the cockroach does for walking (meaning it will move exactly like the roach did). I never did end up figuring out how to make an arc as literally any change to the X speed caused an instant teleport. For the being on the roach's back, the original code simply moved the object a certain amount in the X and Y direction and while that worked slightly, it was better with the revision where it would set the objects location to be set to an equation related to the global X/Y coordinates of the cockroach. This was probably the toughest part to code and past this it was mostly refining work with one last big mechanic left.

(In between these 2 checkpoints I also created the music heard in the game which was done via sampling Mario Galaxy's title theme, a fridge, King Gnux's "Aizo", Mckinley Sandifer's "Holy Ghost Power" and "Greed" from the Sev7n score, with the fridge serving as the base and everything else coming in and out from it.)

Checkpoint 4 was the stage at which the game had already taken shape with the main things the player could do having already been laid out and the main development here was the last object interactions. To cite the journal entry post game testing directly "After playtesting went well the main big development we started working on was the ability to cause the fly to drop after throwing poop at them and being able to deactivate the death state when throwing the fly at the spider. With that finished all that would be left would be to set a win state after the player starts going down the next stair case and possibly extra touch ups if time allows (Playing the death animation, having a tip on a death screen, one last illustration post winning to show what was planned to happen after). Besides extra stuff the main gameplay is technically all finished with a single staircase bug remaining and everything else running well enough." from the stuff that was said as possible the two things added was a game end screen for when you beat the level and letting you throw the fly onto the spider web to stop the spider from killing you. This took a minute as I did not know how to spawn things in once the game was running but to avoid this complication I instead replaced one of the decorative flies with an object which had an if statement to turn on "throwable mode" when colliding with the poop object and when that was activated the fly would fall due to gravity and you'd be able to toss it around like any other object.

As for the throwing "glitches" we have the teleporting objects in spite of them not being next to you and the pepper tweaking. The tweaking is due to the pepper constantly checking it's proximity to you which was done specifically as a fix to the teleporting object glitch, I choose to not copy its code over to the other objects because afterwards the player would only need to carry around one object regardless so it teleporting was more so a time save to avoid the slower carrying speed as well as the tweaking being immersion breaking as is and not wanting to leave that as an overbearing bug.

Last thing of note is the trailer. For this I again chose to sample music with the tracks chosen for this being I Found Jesus by The Gospel Sunliters for that initial note, Make Me Happy by Kendrick Lamar for the slightly ominous choir and Fil Callender & Jah Stitch's Baby My Love for the credits piano. I came up with the trailer idea of an egg popping with the last roach being born, I storyboarded and animated it and then composited that onto existing sprites (which includes the background) and then added a vignette to make it look put together and imposing. 

With that this is essentially a full log of all the visible things I did for the game, we did do organizational meetings every week but we didn't so much so take notes for those and were mostly just meant to make sure everyone was on track