Still a work in progress
Posted by Arne
April 25th, 2010 6:01 pm
Leviathan is being refitted in the secret hideout
So, It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to finish on time. I’m not really sure how close I am to finishing. A lot of the mechanics and data structures are working, but it’s the little stuff which is the most time consuming, like bugs, adjusting values, chopping up graphics, etc.
Seen here is the refit hideout, which is pretty much functional. What’s left is… connecting this game mode to the half finished shooter game mode. While I don’t have any enemies yet, they already have some data structures in place.
Anyways, tomorrow is a busy day, so I won’t be doing anymore work tonight. Goodnight folks.
Your creative process is really inspiring, looking forward to a playable version of this.
I just realized that the reflection of the islands in the water would probably be darker than the sea blue (a blue which is partly a reflection of the bright sky). Oh well.
I’ll probably noodle on this project tomorrow a little.
;-;
sucks that you didn’t finish, i want a playable version. That shot looks very nice.
Aw, poor slave octopus laborers. The wrench guy looks moderately pleased with his situation non the less though. Maybe he has a secret passion for oversized artillery? Being an action/arcade-inclined guy, I’d rather like to see the shooter mode prototyped to a playable state. Would it be realtime and directly controlled, or more like an artillery/tank game where you take turns and aim etc?
Good catch on the reflections. They would probably be way less defined as well. I don’t think objects as large as islands ever produce a recognizable reflection from afar. Perturbations in the water surface become subjectively amplified when the view angle gets more shallow, as you start to see them from the side and “eye rays” will jump from the crest of one wave to the one behind it, rather than trace along a smooth curvy surface as seen more from above. The result would be highly diffused reflections.
Awesome. It seems a little out of scope for the challenge, but certainly a playable game. Looking forward to it.
I wasn’t very active the first day. If I have had those 10+ hours I wasted, I might have had something playable. The game mechanics are quite simple. I don’t have to code AI, tricky physics, or optimization requiring thingamajibs. However, there was still a lot to do, since I wrote the code from scratch in BlitzMax. I could’ve saved a lot of time if I had used my own GUI includes.
I actually prototyped the shooter part first (see older screenshot). It didn’t take long at all. The screen scrolls and enemies appear to come in from the left side of the screen (unorthodox!). I’m not sure how much you’ll be able to steer the leviathan, it’s pretty much a sitting duck anyways.
It’s realtime yeah, so you have three batteries of guns which you can customize. It’s a bit like Mech Warrior. You can fire the batteries in any combination, but heat builds up. Too much heat and you take damage. The turrets fire a lot of bullets, especially the short ranged flak batteries (see older screenshot).
I might mark the enemies with a color. Weapons of the same color do more damage to these enemies. Similarly, some enemies do special damage against the leviathan, like killing off slaves, targeting certain buildings, etc.
The refit screen is where you buy stuff using the resources that you’ve looted from the islands. Everything costs different resources to build (I pretty much finished the mechanics/data structures here yesterday, but the values needs a lot of balancing). Since the islands offer different resources, I’m hoping the player will have to be strategic.
Wow, it looks like your usual amount of thought went into this. Should be awesome, hopefully I can get it to compile if your laptop is still being slow
It’s not compiling that is slow. BlitzMax compiles most of my programs in under 5 seconds. However, I don’t have a network (or dropbox), so I have to transfer files on an USB key, compile, zip up, and it’s a bit of a hassle when the deadline is tight.
I have an ASUS EeePC 1000HE. Its resolution is 1024 x 600, and it slows to a crawl when a canvas/window can’t fit on the screen. I’m guessing it is because of a slow boundary check (to avoid corrupting other memory). Anyways, I made this game in 960 x 512 so it would fit in windowed mode.
I made some progress actually. Got the enemy waves for the 5 isles working, enemies come and can be shot down by different weapons which are bought/built at the secret base. Explosions and water splashes are in.
However, now I’m doing the Action 52 activity.
Well, I’m glad something has been done, it’d be a shame to waste this. Some sort of playable demo would be lovely
I should look into this Action 52 thing actually, it looks pretty cool..
Ah! A fellow BlitzMax coder! I commend thee.