It’s a kind of a neat surprise, that first LD I took part in was anniversary one.

And it’s surprising, how many problems a game about tripod can carry.

First of all, who the hell is Crandell Stryder? Well… It’s a tripod. An alien tripod with pretzel.

How? Oh, don’t ask me. I don’t know. Me and my brother came up with this piece of schitzobakery accidentaly.

Now, about the game, what is it about?

Oh, it’s a walkaround shooter, where you click. Click-click-click. You are big, world is tiny. Crush, kill, destroy.

Initially, Stryder was about to be a noire tripod, wife got killed, he seeks inner peace through the outer rage. But this kinda game needed the plot like porno movie needs one – to show the absurdity at most. So plot was left out.

Coding carried a couple of troubles – biggest one is optimization, and this problem is still open. I don’t think it’s a good temper to let 20.000 bounding boxes break loose at once. But that is a necessary sacrifice. If it wasn’t for level generator, I’d go and bake every shadow. The other trouble is SFX – loads, LOADS. You NEED fumes and flames to give a necessary mood when you cause havok. Otherwise, you could call the game “Mario” and make Barbie the main heroine.

Details are problem too, especially when camera is too far away from them. It was a real headache, when I textured a building and realised that all the goodness cannot be seen. After I painted buildings with colour, they looked silly. So I mixed a city pic with plain white, sometimes gray buildings, and they looked right – just right to be destroyed.

Animation is imperfect, true. But better imperfect, than nothing – it’s a challenge, to imagine something with this legs setup walking. I took inspiration from HL2. It kind of worked.

Targeting precision was also an issue. Yeah you click, but what if you miss a bit? That was the reason to approximate the projectile collision. Also, early idea to destroy a rocket immediately was replaced by marking it for destruction – this way many objects can be hit with explosion. Nice anti-air rockets were also a headache – because of their flight trajectory they were often unable to hit target, while trying to smoothly face it. Rounds and rounds they made, until coded to auto destroy over time.

Maybe there are more to point out, but I can’t really remember them. And who cares for smaller? The challenge was fun, most problems got solved. The game itself is HERE. I hope you like it – and I’d like to hear some feedback too.