There's a newly posted update on the
XDev page.
This isn't really a "
I did all this last night" build, it's what I've squeezed in during the holidays, and is I guess around 8/10 hours work in total, so counts as a 1 day-ish. I'm not trying to be totally anal about how long each build takes.
Now I've actually got to remember what I did. The first main thing I managed to drop in there was the asteroids bouncing off each other. The small ones ignore each other as I think it'll be far too cpu tasking, and too much of a head fuck to be honest ( It'd be like pinball with 30 balls ).
It all seems to work quite nicely, it's pretty subtle, you've got to be watching for it, but I know it's doing it and that's enough for me.
In saying that, I think on later levels ( Level 6 seems to be the first real "kick off" level, around that level it feels pretty sweet ) I may have to drop the checks, or at least test for the number of objects running and skip them when there are too many to test.
Next up I added the "waves". Basically, not all rocks come at you at the same time, there's a trigger point where extra ones will be released. This will need some balancing ( Like all the gameplay, which for me is a long way from being done ) when the baddies are in there.
I guess the biggest thing, in terms of the blog title anyway, is the power-ups. Firstly I added the spray power-up ( I don't think I'm going to stick with that name, it conjures up images of dogs and lamp posts ) which is your standard weapon, plus friends. It looks really good when you've maxed it out at [ Weapon ] level 5.
For all the power-ups there's give and take. For example with the spray power-up, yeah you get 5 shots at once, but the reload time is increased to try and balance that out. It helps me as the coder because it means the games not running as many bullets as it would be if I didn't increase the reload time and will also hopefully bring some balance to the game ( If you max out your power-ups and you're as hard as hell, how do you still make the game fun ? Do you make the baddies that before died with one shot now take 5 shots to keep the challenge going ? If that's the case, you've not actually got a useful power-up, you've just got more sprites on screen. Do you increase the sheer volume of baddies ? Then you could slip into a grind if their easy to kill. It's always a tricky tricky problem ).
The spray PuP didn't take too long, so I moved onto the homing missiles ( Which I knew would ). I've optimised these quite heavily already, but I still think with 4/5 running with a lot of objects there's a performance hit, and that's why I've left them unlocked and maxed out in the current build, so if anyone whose got two mins could give the game a quick play ( 'til around that magic level 6 would be good ) and feedback on their performance and specs that would be great.
If they are generally running crap for everyone ( Fine here, but quad core machine. This baby could run seti@home on it's own, so testing a swf in a realistic enviroment is tricky at times ) then I've still got some ideas to try and claw back some speed whilst still keeping the same look to them.
Squize.