So here’s what I have. It’s written in Flex, uses Box2D for physics, and is REALLY REALLY LAGGY. I have it open in another tab and Firefox 3 is updating the text in this edit field at about 2 fps.

This is Box2DFlash’s debug rendering - I haven’t had time to implement my own - hence lack of graphics and colours and general prettiness. The grey boxes around the edge are enemies; they spawn every 2 seconds from either the left or the right. The slightly larger grey box in the middle is the player. The circles are bullets shot by the player. They don’t do damage (the boxes cannot be killed!) but they do force the enemy boxes back. Each box jumps vaguely in the direction of the player every second or so.

The idea is that the boxes are attacking and you have to push them down to prevent them from touching you. But since you can’t kill them, eventually the whole screen piles up with boxes and you inevitably die.

The boxes were supposed to have smarter AI, and intentionally build towers of themselves rather than just stupidly launching themselves towards you, but that’s obviously not going to happen in time. The other flaw in the plan is that it’s REALLY REALLY LAGGY.

It’s kinda almost fun to play around with, being a physics simulation, but there are too many problems (too laggy, needs proper rendering, too laggy, bullets need to die on impact, need limited ammo and ammo drops, too laggy, need health and dying, needs survival timer, too laggy, needs sound) and too little time to fix them - I have to go to bed now for university tomorrow, and although the deadline is 1pm local time I won’t be able to work on it tomorrow at all. Even if I did fix everything in time, I’m not convinced it’d be a fun game. So I guess I’m calling this one quits.

I’ve failed! Hope you all have better luck!

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 10th, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under LD12 - The Tower. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.