Click for the full page of notes

Phew, finished my game last night at very much the last moment.  Above is the page of scribbled notes accumulated over the 48 hours – a mixture of design ideas and remembering how geometry works.

Post mortem style words after the ‘more’ link.

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Not being able to get to sleep is excellent for redesigning.  I’m now happy with the design for my game, and I even naïvely think I can finish it in time!

Design is:

Space-based sidescroller.  Player given the usual 4-way control of an unarmed ship.

Progress through an (absurdly unrealistically dense) asteroid field.  Asteroids are static and there is always a fairly large safe path through the field.

From behind the player, homing missiles fire!  They are fairly easy to avoid as they react quite slowly to your movements.  The missiles can be tricked into colliding with the asteroids.  Avoiding them provides a moderate challenge when combined with navigating the asteroid field.

Every X seconds, the missiles stop being launched and instead a gunboat flies through the game area.  The gunboat fires volleys of bullets in pretty patterns which the player needs to avoid.  The gunboat can be damaged and destroyed by luring missiles into it.

The trick to the design is that the safest way by far to deal with the missiles is to quickly trick them into hitting an asteroid so that they’re destroyed.  So if you want to damage the gunboat (for mega points) you’ll need to take the risk of keeping a gaggle of missiles alive.  Not only does that mean there’s more missiles trying to kill you, but keeping them all safe from asteroids can become quite a challenge.

Hopefully the end result is a game with dynamic difficulty that is determined by the player’s skill and willingness to take on risk.  A less skilled player can play through just dodging everything, whilst an expert would make sure every missile ends up hitting a gunboat.

Obligatory screenshot:

Who needs collision detection, AI or gameplay when you can have graphics!

Been feeling like I have a cold all day, so I’ve given myself a relaxing time fiddling with graphics instead of doing the real work.

Plan is for the player to fly an unarmed ship that is being chased by (very much armed) enemies.  Duck behind asteroids to avoid fire and trick the enemies into shooting themselves.

Oh yeah!  Smells like innovation.  Innovation and placeholder graphics.

First Ludum Dare, slept a bit late.  Here’s my base code. Handful of geometry, poorly implemented data structures and some alternative image rotation stuff I’ve found useful, and a light-mapped sprite blitter.

I’ll be using FlashDevelop, Pixel Bender, GIMP, SFXR and Audacity (maybe just AS3SFXR).

I’ve a couple of ideas on the theme, but they feel kind of dull and/or predictable for now.  We’ll see!