I don’t like bugs.

I think I’ve just spent the last 3-4 hours completly rewriting my fleet movement/tweening code like 4 times and back again.. and have FINALLY solved my #$^$!@ engineering problem…. arg.

Need a break now… but the good news is I finally have smooth movement of the fleet in all directions and it doesn’t matter how many echeleon patterns you are shifting through…. it is all fine dandy.

Don’t ya love programming? 

Phew. I just got the “AI” system I’ve been working on the last hours to work at least a decently. The enemy ships don’t move totally random anymore, they try to line up so they can hit your ships at least. It’s still really stupid though, especially when close to the screen edges but it’s as good as I’ll bother to make it I think.

I’ve also implemented levels and game-over conditions, a shop where you buy new ships between the levels and done tons of bugfixes/speedups since yesterday. There is still one really annoying bug where the sprites sometimes doesn’t get cleared completely and leave one or two lingering pixels, but I’m sure I’ll figure that out soon.

After that there is mostly fine polishing left to do, the shop screen is very, very minimalistic right now, to the point of not making any sense, the interface graphics could also need some love and after that it’s on to game balancing.

Probably my least-finished LD entry (not counting ones I didn’t even start), Termites is the adventuresome tale of a small band of termites on a very small screen. All you can do is wander around and chew up grass, making termite babies with which to devour the couple of buildings onscreen.

It’s kind of entertaining to enjoy the simulation a bit. This ‘game’ cannot currently be downloaded anywhere in particular.

I tried thinking out of the box and failed miserably.

The theme was growth, I thought of the idea of crystal growth and pretty much made an incomprehensible game with crystals in it. Hardly anyone figured out how to play the sodding thing. The final insult was that I ran out of time so you could build yourself an army but had no-one to fight.

The bright side was I was quite pleased with the overall look and User interface. It’s a basic RTS engine with minimap and group selection, resource collection etc.

Some of the development was stalled due to me not knowing how to debug. I wrote the game In Blitz max, having downloaded the demo version on the thursday before the compo. I didn’t figure out how the debugger worked (or even that it had one) until sunday.