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 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.
I finally settled on a title for the local multiplayer game I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. Presenting:
Laser Bash
This evening I finally got around to redo the way movement input is handled in the game. By this I mean the way the game interprets the information it receives from a gamepad analog stick. The current implementation works, but it could be better.
Today I’ve been trying to work around a problem I’ve been having with Unreal Engine. It’s surely just down to my lack of experience, but I’ve been having a hard time figuring out how to have the game recognise which players attached to which controllers want to start a game.
Today I worked on adding some kind of effect which would occur whenever a player was fragged. I wanted it to be an easily noticeable effect of some description; A text label appearing to show a point increase wasn’t going to be adequate.
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Today I started building a new level for the game so I could ditch the old placeholder level from the previous screenshots. I want the final game to have several different arenas, with different level themes. And although theming isn’t really a high priority at the moment, I’d like to be able to have at least one presentable looking level that represents the visual style of the finished game. I also think a nice looking level will make the game feel less like a prototype as I work on it and show various people.
My new project is a local multiplayer game for PC. It’s in a very basic state at the moment, but after some playtesting of a quick prototype, I decided it’s something I want to put more time into.
I’m aiming for the game to be a couch multiplayer game in the style of Nidhogg, Towerfall or the Sportsfriends games, something that’s easy to pick up and play, but has some depth to it.