VectorStorm Blog

Whoops, forgot to mention earlier;  I’ve updated the Win32 VectorStorm binary build with the Space Maze Express gameplay prototype.  It also has the overlay demo (mentioned in an earlier post) in the Testbed game slot.

So if you feel like experimenting with lifting boxes using only an Asteroids ship, there ya go.  :)

It’s pretty easy to divide all video games into two groups. “Good” vs. “bad”, for example, is a fairly common (albeit subjective) division. And people like dividing things on that axis, so it’ll probably always be the main one, even if nobody can agree on precisely which games belong in each camp.

But there are other, more descriptive ways to categorise games.

One that I’ve been thinking about a lot recently, during my creation of Game in a Week games is the difference between process-based and content-based games. These days, nearly all professional video games are content-based, whereas a high proportion of independent and freeware video games are process-based. Virtually all traditional tabletop games are process-based, but some newer tabletop games are content-based. Here’s what I mean by these terms:

Continue reading “Two types of game”

So there’s no maze yet, but I’m getting there.

This is a screenshot of an initial grappling testbed.  That’s the Asteroids ship transplanted into a world with gravity, and a rope attached.  If the rope’s end touches a box (or any non-static physics object, actually), it will automatically attach, and the player can fly it around.   Press the ‘A’ button to release the object.  As an initial testbed, it’s working pretty well, I think.

A key point in the implementation here is that the rope changes color, to show you whether or not it has connected to something.  Without that, it can sometimes be difficult to tell whether or not it’s managed to grab the object you want it to.

So I’ve decided not to do a Game in a Week this week. Instead, I’m going to implement a third test harness game to be included in the main VectorStorm distribution.

Continue reading “Test Harness in a Week”

That last screenshot was pretty subtle. Here’s one that’s downright garish.

These are three boxes, rendered using a single overlay. Each box is rendered as ‘white’ in VectorStorm, but they’re all sitting under a single overlay that acts as a gradient from red to green, so the final colors that show on screen are between red and green, depending on locations of the boxes.

As the boxes move and spin, they move beneath the color overlay as you would expect them to; the color is stationary on the screen as though it was a sheet of cellophane laid over it, rather than moving along with the boxes.

Note that in this shot the gradient doesn’t line up precisely between the two larger boxes, since I’m rendering the overlay by calculating the correct colour at each vertex, instead of per-pixel. I’ll eventually write a fragment shader to calculate this effect correctly per pixel, which will probably actually turn out to be even faster. But for now, this will do. :)