A few days have passed, so its time for me to write a postmortem before I forget everything I did with Invasive.

First: Thanks to everyone who played my game!

This is long, and possibly of little interest so I’ll hide it behind a read-more tag.
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And I’m all out of games. Anyone got bubblegum?

So, since the compo ended I played and rated 172 games. Basically I started with the web games, then went through people I recognized from one or another site… then I started in on my assigned games, and when I finished those I just kinda kept rating…

If I didn’t rate your game it was because:

Some stuff I want to say:

Don’t play 172 games in 2.5 days. They start to blend together, and there are some which I probably did not give the time they needed in order to be assessed. (Not -YOURS- dear reader, yours was unique and captivated me )

Everybody- Please DO indicate on your title screen how to get to the main menu. And if you include a line that says ‘Press the Any-Key to continue’, please make sure the left arrow works.

(I pick on Flash, because I do Flash.)

I thought the over all quality of the submissions was really high! I enjoyed making my game, I enjoyed playing all yours! I’m looking forward to doing this again in August!

-TF

Submitted.

The start of a sound handling system is in the source code, but I’ve decided not to implement it. I’m starting to break code while tinkering, so I think it’s time to call it a wrap and get some sleep. From version 0.6, many bugfixes of varying severity. No major gameplay changes.

Good luck to everyone still working!
-TF

New build here

I now have a title screen, win/lose screens, and the game can reset itself nicely. Made a number of small changes for aesthetics (aligning text, cleaning up the intermediate zoom sand tiles, etc).

I’ve had enough play testing now, to decide that I needed to change the walls so they block both the glompers and the kiwis. So that’s done. I don’t want to make traps life-limited, so that means I’m getting close to done.

Quite a bit of CPU usage on my computer, but it seems stable and I don’t seem to be leaking memory (for once )

I just need to figure out what sound effects I need/can generate… Thumps and such when the player adds objects are easy enough, but if I add a sound when things get eaten, it will be getting played more or less continuously in midgame.

-TF

The clock thingy says 13 hours left, so I think I’m in decent shape. Unfortunately, I’m starting to feel the time pressure & starting to feel tired. I’d rather have one or the other…

Player can now place objects, and the Glompers and Kiwis interact correctly with them. Screenie:

Playable build here.

It’s kind of funny– I originally planned for the glompers to only be visible 1% of the time. So part of the game, was to figure out where they were and build defenses to keep them away from the kiwis. But unless I slow everything down, that just doesn’t matter.

The other problem I’m seeing is that the Glompers reproduce just way too fast. So, instead of having them spawn every time they eat a kiwi, I’m going to require them to eat a specific number of kiwis. (I’ll define as a constant, and tune as I work on other stuff). This -might- give the player a chance.

Another thing that might be better, would be to have the walls stop both Glompers and Kiwis. This would let the player create a preserve of kiwis.

ToDo:

-TF

No screenshot, but I’ve got the basic movement and predator/prey dynamic set up now in Version 0.3 of Invasive. (Available here)

Decided to stick with the name Glompers for the invasive species, and Kiwis for the endangered species. Starting with 5 Glompers, the Kiwis all get eaten in about a minute.

So far I’m not doing any real pathfinding at all… The kiwis are choosing a direction randomly each frame (and getting stuck in the SE corners of each island for some reason I haven’t figured out yet), and the Glompers move in one direction until they hit an edge, at which point they change direction. I may change the Kiwis to have the same movement schema as the Glompers…

I think I’m going to need something which the Kiwis can run into that makes them spawn. That can be a player placeable object in addition to the not-yet-implemented traps and walls. Otherwise I think the game will be over before the player has a chance to do anything.

On the plus side, my engine seems to be handling a couple thousand kiwis pretty well! Rather than using Gilbert’s collision detection, I added a map-sized blank bitmap to my Fauna class (which holds all the animals). Since I don’t actually add that bitmap to the stage at any time, it doesn’t seem to be dragging down my rendering performance very much. When the kiwis move, they plot their location on that map as a single pixel, and when the glompers move, they check to see if they’re on a pixel that has the kiwi color. The glompers thus only have to check the entire kiwi list if they’re definately in collision with at least one kiwi. This can probably be optimized further, but it seems good enough for now.

-TF

For some reason, I just wasn’t able to get a good start yesterday. Starting to catch up now I think.

Click here for my in-progress builds (Requires Flash Player)

Sticking the rest of this behind a read-more tag, since there’s a bunch of images.
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I got the time off from work for LD17 (which was the reason I missed LD16), so I’m probably in.

I guess it’s time to declare tools, etc.

My Tools:
FlashDevelop + FlexSDK
Audacity + sfxr
GiMP

If I need collision detection, I’ll use Troy Gilbert’s 2007 Pixel Perfect Collision Detection class. (I think this is within the spirit of the competition.)

Anything else I need I’ll generate after the compo begins.

-TF