For the past two weeks, I’ve been participating in the Idle Thumbs Wizard Jam. Naturally, I decided to make an arcade game where you shoot pizzas out of the sky.
I finally got around to figuring out how to use the in-editor screen capture tool, so I can record 60 FPS video now. Here’s a few gifs of what the game looks like at the moment. Now that I’m able to, I’ll be posting more of these in the future.
For the past few months I’ve been working on something new on the side. It’s a project that spun out of a really quick prototype I made in a weekend which, when I showed a few friends, I realised had some potential if it were fleshed out bit more.
Whoa, it’s been a while… I don’t know where the time has gone but I’ve just realised that it’s suddenly February and I haven’t made a post since GameCity. I think it’s time for an update.
Last week I attended the GameCity festival in Nottingham, and it was a blast! I met a lot of really nice people there; people who make, play and write about games. It was the first outing I’d had showing a game in public, and the first actual public test of Laser Bash, so suffice to say I was both excited and terrified in nearly equal measure.
I thought it would be a good idea to start posting up some of the problems I run into while developing the game, along with the solution I manage to eventually come up with. It might come in handy for anyone reading, and at the very least it’s useful for me to write this stuff down for future reference.
I’ve been working on the scripting of the game logic for beginnings and ends of rounds, and I came across a bit of a puzzle. At the end of a round, I need to be able to use the player’s scores (stored in an array) to find the winner of the round. It’s a simple enough task, but the solution took me a surprising amount of effort to arrive at. The solution I came up with was so simple I’m wondering why I didn’t come up with it to begin with.
I spent part of my weekend designing and implementing the first powerup. I had a loose idea of how it would work beforehand, but I took some time to reevaluate how it should function in the game.
Players will be able to drop this powerup like a Mario Kart banana, and then when it is active, players who get too close to it will get sucked in like a black hole and destroyed when they reach the center.
Long grass is now implemented in the game. It’s the first level obstacle to be added to the game since it left the prototype stage.