VectorStorm Blog

I meant to mention this in the “Post-Mortem”, but forgot.  So I’m mentioning it here:

C4 Ten-Four used the “Loose, leading, ground-stabilised” camera that I showed off in the most recent “VGKnowHow” episode, with virtually no changes to the code.  Made me smile to be able to just drop that code straight into a new game and have it just work without modification!

As you’ll recall, the randomly selected theme sentence for C4 Ten-Four was the following sentence:

” ‘A hundred and four.’

I will confess that when I first saw that sentence, I seriously thought about ignoring it and selecting a different topic sentence.  I suppose that by chance, I’ve actually been pretty lucky with topic sentences thus far;  most of them have been meaty and had all sorts of possibilities suggested by them.  This was the first time that I had such a short sentence;  a sentence fragment, in fact, with no obvious design hooks to start from.

Back in one of the early GiaW processes (I think it was #2?) I did modify the random selection rules after getting a bad initial sentence, and randomly selected a new sentence to use instead instead.  That’s how I ended up with the rule about disregarding any sentence which included a proper name.  (The themes are supposed to be suggesting novel gameplay concepts, not simply suggesting characters or locations, and so discarding sentences which specify those specifics seemed quite in keeping with the spirit of the Game in a Week process.)  But in this case, where the sentence just wasn’t suggesting anything particularly obviously.. well.. I had trouble justifying exactly why this wouldn’t be a legal sentence for me to use.  And so in the end, I went with it.

Continue reading “C4 Ten-Four Post-Mortem”

I really would have liked to put in an introductory sequence, but there’s simply no time;  it’s 10:30pm, and I need to handle final packaging and uploading.  So 104 is done!

Watch the space to the right for downloads.  Should be within an hour.

Update:  It’s now available for download!  Check the sidebar.  And now, I’m going to go have a little food (skipped dinner), watch a little television, and do some laundry.  And then, sleep.

It’s 4pm on the day that the game is due, and I’m changing the player control.

Yup, apparently I’m still me.

Things done today:

• Player control basically finalised.  Feeling pretty good about it.
• First pass at world generation.
• Lots of improvements to VectorStorm’s Box2D integration.
• Discovered that the game idea I’ve been pursuing this week has been done before.  Not changing it, though.
• Played a couple games of StarCraft 2.  Should really learn to not do this, especially when I’m trying to rapidly prototype a game;  it only winds me up and makes me too tense to code.

Best bug of the day:

My first revision of the world generation algorithm worked basically correctly, except that for some reason, the world geometry hadn’t been correctly flagged as static, and so immediately fell off the screen, obeying simple gravity.   Oops!

My goal for the remainder of today is to reach a “first playable” point where the game is playable from start to end.  That’ll leave tomorrow for visuals, sound, and polish.