VectorStorm Blog

Well, I did it! From initial concept to fully playable prototype in just one day. (And I even still have several hours left in the day! But I think I’ll take a little time off to watch Iron Chef, which I taped earlier today)

I’m not going to give away the gameplay, except to say that I think this is one of the most fun games I’ve written in an awfully long time, and that I think it would extend into a more fully scaled game rather easily. And that the game is played to a finite time limit; the player has infinite lives.

Stuff that remains to be done:

• Music (if any; not sure if it’s appropriate for this game)
• Sound (need a lot of sound effects for this game)
• Title screen menu (I’ll probably blatantly steal the Asteroids one again)
• “How to play” screen.
• “Story” screen.
• General polish.

Looking very good for the release tomorrow. I might do another hour’s work on it later tonight, but for right now, Allez Cuisine!

So I’ve made a rather major change of direction with Munchers. Up until today, I had been building a game which I’ve finally decided just wasn’t sufficiently “Munchers”; the Muncher was basically just a projectile in a pretty standard artillery-style game.

So I’ve changed direction, and am now working toward a different goal-game. I find it interesting that I did this with Damsel as well, except that the game change happened on the Thursday, with Damsel, whereas it didn’t happen until Saturday morning, this time. (But I still expect to have a fully playable game by the end of the day, and that’ll still leave me ahead of Damsel!)

I now have a randomly generated world, and some basic player control. Just need to add some enemies, and some simple pathfinding and AI for them, and it’ll be fully playable. But right now, it’s time to break for lunch. Back in half an hour!

Yesterday I talked a bit about how much time I had lost, trying to extend VectorStorm’s collision system to support colliding bounding spheres against line segments, when I really should have just hardcoded the particular boundaries I wanted things to be restricted from crossing.

Today, I’m singing a different tune; I tried my hand at it again, and have had success! This dramatically simplifies some of the Munchers code, as it means I can simply drop collision lines into my collision scene, and have objects automatically react to them in reasonable ways, without spending time coding each one individually. This should actually save me a lot of time, and let me put a good deal more into Munchers than I had originally expected.

The down side, of course, is that I still don’t have a first playable version. That’ll be tomorrow, I suspect. As long as I get that first playable version of the game before Sunday, I’ll still be doing better than I did with Damsel!

Just a quick note..  it’s Thursday night, and I don’t have a “first playable” of the game idea, although I do have a pretty solid game design in my head, and the basic game mechanics are mostly implemented.

So I’m further along now than I was with Damsel at this time of the week, but  not as far as I really wanted to be.  I wasted far too much time today trying to extend the VectorStorm collision system to support line segments..  I should really just hardcode support for the collision lines that I really need (honestly, just the borders of the play area), and I’d have been a lot further along now, if I hadn’t been tempted into attempting system-level work.  That’s an important lesson for the next time I do one of these.  :)

Not too much to talk about, today; I’ve done a lot of thinking about design, but haven’t really come to a definite design decision. However, I’ve started on code and some visual design. In particular, I have an initial, rough design for the Munchers, whatever they turn out to be in regards to the gameplay. I’m imagining them coming in a whole variety of colours.