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SoCoder -> Blogs Home -> Blogs |
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Jayenkai
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Like a Womble : Space War'Making good use of the things that they find' |
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I've been putting this off for a while. Now it's September, and I've made it my 1st game for the month. Technically, I could make it my game for the whole month, but considering I only just started it yesterday, I'm making remarkable progress!  MMmmm... Making good use of... 1. Shroom's Orbital Physics. BOY is it put to use here! Unfortunately, Shroom, you ain't gonna get this running at a decent speed on your system! Lots of sprites 2. Wood Workshop. To create nice "Bumpmap" esque tiled textures. 3. Blitz3D! To create those gorgeous spheres. Render, Grab, Sprite.. Sorted! 4. My rubbish artwork. Making your ships highly visible! (as in, they stick out a mile!) I need to fix those! Current Features 1. Teams! Up to 8 teams in a game. Could be more, but I ran out of colors! 2. Ships per Team! Up to... Um... A MOTHERLOAD! 3. Ships in General! Currently 4 types. Once I can draw goodlier, more types!! 4. Weapons! Currently 12 different weapons, from simple pops and bangs, to Clusterbombs to Flamethrowers! 5. Gravity! Loads and loads of swirly gravity! Coming Soon Shop! Ships! Guns! Utility Weapons! Garages! AI!! (eek!) ... But.. Could I actually manage Online Gaming for the first time? |
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Comments |
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| Saturday, 08 September 2007, 18:00 | |
spinal
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Did you start with the game idea, or the random bits of code that you though might glue well?
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| Saturday, 08 September 2007, 20:54 | |
svrman
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"Worms" in space? Would be cool if the planet's gravity affected your projectiles...
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| Sunday, 09 September 2007, 01:36 | |
Jayenkai
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The idea started to form the second Shroom posted his gravity snippet. It just took this long for the whole Ship/Weapon combo idea to form in my head, thus making this game slightly more strategic than it normally would be, and worth giving it all a go. So, um. It started with Shroom's code, then was enhanced by my WW entry here. I'm currently considering redoing all the main |edit| graphics! |edit| as 3D sprites, so I can add all sorts of rotations, and not have to individually colour each ship. ... Not too sure if I can pull that off, though!
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| Sunday, 09 September 2007, 03:34 | |
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Jayenkai
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... I spent 2 hours trying to get the 3D stuff looking right, and got absolutely nowhere.. I'm going back to drawimage!
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| Monday, 10 September 2007, 07:58 | |
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Jayenkai
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Having realised that the gameplay reminded me more of Scorched Tanks, than it did Worms, I've spent most of today fiddling with Fruityloops, trying to get a nice rendition of Sidewinder's "Horizon's Edge" going. ... The original theme from Scorched Tanks.. .. It was on the Amiga. .. Well, anyway.. I've been doing that, today, and it's coming along quite nicely. So that'll be the theme tune, and I've also decided to name the game "Sidewinder", too. 'cos that's a nice name, and I figured it'd be a decent tribute to the guy who's song I'm ripping off! A simple but effective "plain text" logo has been plonked in, and the titlescreen is pretty much done until I finalise the logo. Next up, I really should sort out those ships. If anyone would like to attempt to draw some nice render-looking ships, preferably in a fleet of different colors, that'd be nice. I'm actually after around 7 or 8 different looking ships, ranging from tiny scouters, up to larger warships. Any size will do, but aim for 32x32 for the larger ships. Once I've decided on a nice fleet, I'll get started on all the game menu, team creation, weapon purchasing, and all that jazz. I just have to stop playing the damn thing!
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| Monday, 10 September 2007, 23:10 | |
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Jayenkai
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Poor yellow scouter.. Right in the middle of an explosion!  A marked improvement, I think you'll agree. Rather than redraw the little ships, I added a bit of PaintShop Pro "Inner Bevel", and they magically looked less rubbish! I then played with the saturation on them a little, and they ended up looking rather nice. The other addition (although you didn't know it wasn't there, earlier!) is that I've added some particles. You can just about see them flying about in the screenshot above. Nice coloured chunks of darkish rubble eminating from the many explosions onscreen. To help reduce slowdown, I set up a 250 particle maximum limit in the engine. I might add an option for more than that, if people want to really stress out their systems  And, of course, there's the title theme, too. It's all coming along rather nicely, even if I do say so myself
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| Thursday, 13 September 2007, 07:30 | |
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Jayenkai
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Took a couple of days off from coding, and now I'm starting work on the whole shop thing. So far, you can buy ships for your team. No weapons are in the shop yet, since I've not yet decided how I should distribute them. I'd like there to be add-on packs for weapons, and maybe a Build Your Own Weapons option, but that would require a scripted style for holding them. Eeek! I'm also adding in a whole bunch of ingame options, so there's plenty of variety in the gameplay. (Default options are in brackets) Option 1. Selects whether player's ships are scattered around, or gathered in a group. (Scattered) Option 2. Selects whether the shop is available between rounds, just in the first round, or not at all. (Between rounds) Option 3. Selects whether you can buy/sell ships. With each ship type having different parameters, you must choose your ships carefully. (Enabled) Option 4. Selects whether you have Team weapons, or Ship weapons. That is, if you buy a "Mega-Blaster", will it be usable by all ships that can use it.. Or will it only sit within the armoury of the ship that you buy it for. (Team) Option 5. Selects whether items get carried between round.. Lots of possibilities here, ranging from Leftover ships, Leftover ships with fully restored energy, All weapons, Only default ships, Only default weapons and a couple more choices, too. (Weapon stockpile + Addition per round) Option 6. Selects whether your ships can be moved. (Yes! Of course!) Option 7. Selects whether you can select the ship to use on your turn, or just use the next one in order. (Select) That's quite a selection, so far, and I'm 100% certain I'll come up with a whole bunch more in the next few days. I'll design a Scheme Load/Save thing, too, so you can Quick Play with any of the available schemes. At the moment you can Quick Play with up to 4 teams. I've added an option to play against a CPU Opponent, so I guess I should really get working on the AI next. .. I really don't want to get working on the AI!
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| Friday, 14 September 2007, 10:06 | |
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Jayenkai
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Today I started work on the scripted weaponary. (whilst desperately trying to avoid the AI stuff) I decided to use the 3D rendering->sprite technique that I used for rendering the planets. For those who wish to follow suit. Step 1. Load the original 16x16 sprite as a texture. Step 2. CreateImage(16,16,64) Step 3. Setup a simple 3D view. Cube with texture, Camera, plain lighting. Step 4. Set the camera viewport to 16x16 pixels. Step 5. Render, Rotate, Repeat Voila, 64 differently angled sprites, all nice and neat looking. They're saved into an array, and each weapon is linked to an image. As the script loads the weapons, it checks the stated image's filename against previously loaded weapons, so if all the clusterbombs throw out "Cluster001.png", it only needs to load/rotate/"spritify" that image once.. then it keeps reusing it for all the clusters. Nice and easy. And the array currently allows for up to 1024 different weapon graphics. (To which more can be easily added if need be... but 1024 weapons is a heck of a LOT!) So, weapon scripts are almost working. I just need to add a bunch of commands to allow for allsorts of different weapon types. Lovely! 
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| Monday, 17 September 2007, 08:55 | |
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Jayenkai
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The weapon scripts I had tried to code ended up REALLY slow, so I redid them. Now they're working great, with XML style coding. Worms-Style Banana Bombs! When it explodes, it throws 5 bananas backwards, through an 80 degree radius. (140-220)  That's pretty much working now, so I'm off to make a few million weapons! .. still need to do that AI!
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| Monday, 17 September 2007, 18:45 | |
blanko1324
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Bananas? In space? Sp-ananas? That's madness! Looks like loads of fun.
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