Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Game play introduction


This video introduces a new concept and illustrates nicely what the sun is for! The weapons are solar powered and hence only activate when the sun is high in the respective player's hemisphere. Here we can see P1 and P2 weapons firing in turn as the sun moves. Note they are sharing components currently, but the results vary depending on the originating beam direction. Without moving components the effect would repeat so you can save bandwidth and simulate a successive "days" by hitting play again. Objects may be moved in real time independently of the turn based firing.

Incidentally the beams look very complication and only flash up for an instant. I suggest you use the blogger player pause button to examine the P1 and P2 laser configurations to see what's going on in a comfortable time frame. I will be using this object configuration to test the coding in step 2 below.

Tomorrow will be divided into 2 areas. 1) Removing the debug control mode and fixing the 1P and 2P controls. This will involve a little more design as I want to determine the features to permit a player to use. Currently my dilemma is whether to permit a free roving cursor for sabotaging enemy objects. My feeling is it will slow the pace down, we'll see what happens! The second area 2) Will be some reasonably hardcore code to spread the computation of the beam reflection calculations over multiple cycles so remove any display flicker. This will mean I need to freeze a computation status when time gets a little shy, and resume it on the next display cycle. It should be OK as I have used a lot of variables (bad me,) so saving the registers and adding a state engine should be all that's needed. Once that's in place the core engine will be complete, just needing improved collision detection (for which there will now be time if it is spread over multiple cycles) allowing me to concentrate on gameplay and making the game FUN!

Step 3 will probably be next week, which will be building the level engine so that difficulties and parameters such as object and their location may be controlled for each level.


1 comment:

- said...

looks good so far!

looking forward seeing it live at eurocon. keep up the good work.

martijn