Contribution+Ideas

** Another Bug? **
So far we are leaning toward the idea of small improvements for Fortune Hunter, mainly the ones addressed on their [|active ticket tracker], possibly fixing the (only) other bug, the Dungeon 3 Stuck bug. This would require us to actually play the game to that point where the player gets stuck in the dungeon. Since we haven't gotten that far before, we would really have to understand the rules and gameplay, and then look into the appropriate sections of code to find out what could be causing this problem. Jon suggested that we play version 2 of the game (they are currently working on version 3) to get a better understanding of the game as well.

**Graphics? **
We were also interested in improving some of the graphics of the game, specifically the enemies. They are currently transparent wherever they have the color black. We tested this in class Thursday by finding in the folder hierarchy and the code itself where certain enemy characters were used and editing the graphics files in Gimp to make black appear as a different, noticeable color. We were correct in thinking the black color was the problem since other colors showed up fine. So it might be somewhere in the code that specifically calls out that color and sets it as something else, but we have yet to find it. This is listed as a task, Update GUI Art in the ticket tracker.

After further investigating the color issue, we found that there was a function convert alpha. This will look for a certain color and change the alpha (transparency) of that color. This allows you to be able to see the background behind the character. There must be a method somewhere that makes everything black transparent. There is an enemy called "Bone Sprout" which uses dark gray instead of black. When it is displayed in the game, it shows up perfectly. Perhaps an easy fix would be to change the outlines in the enemies that use black to dark gray; this could be done easily in Photoshop. The images are saved as ".gif," so that would not be a problem with photoshop. This way they would have the same look, but they would not be converted to an alpha of zero, which makes them transparent.

**Other improvements? **
Other contribution ideas include always-needed documentation and maybe some minor improvements to gameplay. Jon mentioned that they were in the process of converting the code over to the new version. There are many tasks listed in the ticket tracker that are requests to add the functionality from version 2 over to version 3. For example, adding back a victory screen, resetting player inventory and stats upon death, etc. Some of these tasks are listed as "major priority" so it may be very beneficial to Fortune Hunter for us to help with these tasks. However, looking into the other bug might be the best way to start off the rest of our contributions for the semester.

Other possible improvements would be to add simple visual elements during the battle scenes. Currently, the battle is confusing because there is no sign that the player attacks the enemy or when the enemy attacks the player. Since there are very simplistic graphics in the game, we could possibly add some visual sign of attack. For example, when the player uses a fire attack on the enemy, we could flash an image of fire a few times. I saw that there was already a fire image in the source code, but we're not sure the current use of that image.