PAX is over, time to relax a little.

I write this sitting on a beach. It’s relaxing, but I’m more worried about getting sand in the keyboard. This week will be a calm, relaxing break before the final whirlwind (it’s so scary that graduation is only seven weeks away). PAX is now over, but it was a whole ‘nother whirlwind before (and during). Over the past week, we have added the improved whiteboard break rooms, all of the playable characters and respective animations, improvements to the game flow, updating many of the sounds, and fixing as many bugs as we could find. We were all worn out by the end.

We learned so much at PAX – we had over a thousand people play a round or two! Our tutorial can be smoother, and that’s something we’ve noted for a while now – the game has just been evolving at such a rapid pace that we’ve neglected it. We are planning to add button prompts above the relative items for each stage of the tutorial to help engrain what buttons perform which actions. This also shows the pitfalls of Playstation vs Xbox controllers, with PS’ X button being Xbox’s A button, and on the Xbox controllers, we use both X and A a lot, so to people who play more on Playstation, their controllers are different, and muscle memory took over. Otherwise, the booth was really well presented; Will did a great job creating marketing materials for it. I really hope Champlain believes we represented them well. We seemed to have a constant flux of people playing, and we even had lines at the busier moments, which is a huge boost of pride to the team.

We also received a lot of praise, which was a little unexpected. Richard and Will said that there were complete strangers laughing with each other, and if Office Mayhem can do that, maybe it’s not half bad. There were a good handful of people asking where to buy it. Buy it. Those words seem alien to me. People are willing to pay money for Office Mayhem – that’s insane. We also had people from 3 to 63 learn, play, and have fun playing it, which finally solidifies our target market of a couch party game – you never know who’s going to be sitting on the couch next to you.

We also might have some very, very, very exciting news about Office Mayhem in the near future, but I can’t play that hand quite yet. I hope to be able to talk more about it soon.

In my last post about Action, I mentioned that Action did not have support for bezier/custom curves. I have since added that functionality with Action::GetCurveFromPoints(T x1, T y1, T x2, T y2) for cubic bezier curves, and Action::GetCurveFromPoint(T x1, T y1) for quadratic curves. The functions clamp the x coordinates to [0, 1] to prevent the time axis from going in reverse, which could cause some ill-intended effects.

I also have encapsulated the framework entirely in the Action namespace – before the timing functions were not under it. Hopefully this will fix any potential namespace clashes.

Simply update your local repository, or pull it.