May, 2010

A significant refinement of yesterday’s design. Foe spawning much improved, physics tweaked (much for the better in my opinion), and sprint ability added. In addition, I made some changes which should give significant speed improvements. Try it out! I think it’s quite a bit more difficult now, also (which is good, because #14 was a little too easy once you got the hang of it).

A more interesting variation on yesterday’s project, much more fun in my opinion. Refining enemy spawn could be a good next step.

Added:

• “Shockwave” weapon
• Significant improvements in foe to foe collision detection
• Score counter
• Arrow key support
• Space bar now starts game (no mouse interaction needed)

This is quite a significant update, so I’m just going to list new features below:

• Foes now have slightly randomized movement (in both speed and direction) to avoid clumping so easily
• Added game over screen with score display
• Modified foe generation; there is now one additional foe per wave
• I severely modified the physics to make it much more playable (less momentum, basically)
• Most significantly, foes now collide with each other; on such an collision they “explode,” taking out any other foes in the area, and possibly the player. Try chaining them!

Building off of yesterday’s work; avoid being hit by the dots; see how many you can avoid! Many things to add, but this one was already quite a bit of work — good thing there’s still the rest of the week, and summer for that matter, in front of me!

A fresh start, using much better coding practices. Control the lil’ dude with WASD keys. Included so far are simple cardinal direction controls, wall collision detection, realistic acceleration and friction, etc. The start of a good basic physics simulation; I think I could build many a toy on this foundation, and I plan to, this week. My unspoken (until now) goal is to have something more like a “game” this week, but we’ll see how it goes. I think it will likely be influenced by the large amounts of Geometry Wars 2: Pacifism mode I’ve been playing; I have some ideas for toying with similar mechanics which could be quite fun. Nerdy notes: everything here is much better in terms of OOP; pretty much fully encapsulated, vector classes with helpful helper functions, etc. On top of all that, and probably most importantly, this is the first Toy on which I’ve used time-based animation, which is a critical and important step forward for real-time animation things. So far, it hasn’t really mattered, but it will if I intend on moving towards game-type interactivity, which, as I said above, I do. Overall, I’m quite pleased with it.