So I just got finished implementing the mini map for the game.  It looks like this:

(Note the colored dots all around the perimeter of the screen, indicating out-of-view enemies.)

It was kind of a pain to implement, I mean, in hindsight the math is pretty simple.  I originally thought I’d need trigonometry to solve it, but it turns out I didn’t even need it at all.  (Good ol’ reliable y = mx + b to the rescue.)

This weekend I gave the enemies some AI.  All they do is notice you’re (the player) in their area and they go into attack mode.  Attack mode consists of following you and shooting.  Later today I intend to make the AI slightly more robust and also work on tweaking the player’s movement via the accelerometer.  Right now it’s very annoying and I’ve been putting off fixing it.

I also did some other things including:

• Pooling all of the small mass-items (pickups, bullets, explosions).
• Having the player attract pickups in his vicinity as well as have him transform.
• The HUD bars accurately display the players XP and transformation progress (note the full blue bar, partially full purple bar, and the purple player in the screenshot above).
• Other things.

I would go on about this a bit more, but I have to run to class now.  In Paranoia 2 news, still moving ahead strong.  I’ll probably give a screenshot or two sometime this week, it’s coming along nicely.

So this post is a little late, I completely forgot about posting on Monday, I was too busy working on the game.  (No seriously, I was really working on the game.)

How’s that for a logo?  I might end up adding some of the ships flying around in the background shooting at each other and such.

Anyway, I’m happy to report that everything I needed to do prior to this post was completed.  I can now have my ship fly around and shoot at the enemies, delivering damage and having them explode.  The destroyed enemies also drop little fruit pickups that the player can pick up to increase his XP (and points).  It’s not implemented just yet, but as the XP increases beyond certain levels, the player’s ship transforms and allows for more / stronger bullets to be fired (I’m actually going to be implementing this as soon as I’m done with this post).

So the to-do list for next Monday consists of:

• Implement player transformations based on XP.
• Pickups delete themselves when far enough away, they also attract themselves to the player when close enough.
• Pool bullets, pickups, and explosions (for performance, even though the game still runs at a solid 60fps as of now).
• Tweak movement, make it easier.  Also work on the “strafe” button and get that working.
• Implement “special ability” which makes the player temporarily much stronger and invincible (involves some animation and code tweaking).
• Add King Durian and have him function properly (the goal of each level is to destroy the Durians in the level).
• Get minimap working (may be more difficult then I think, but I’ll try to get it done in time).
• Work on enemy AI, get player health working, get score working, “pause” button – (probably will be done next week).

I think that’s good enough for this week’s to-do list.

In Paranoia 2 news, nothing new.  I haven’t worked on it much, I’m focusing more on the game right now.

A little less than 2 weeks and I’m officially done with my 3rd year of college (aka summer vacation).  What does that mean in terms of my productivity?  Hopefully good things…

This past week has been somewhat productive for me.  Now that I have a good portion of the HUD in place for Space Fruit, things are going much more smoothly.  (I was having a bit of trouble getting things working efficiently what with me being new to OpenGL and such.)

As you can see from the above in-game screenshot, not only is the HUD practically finished (more on that in a second), but I also have bullets completely functional.  It was a bit of a pain hardcoding in all of the trigonometry for the creation points of each bullet for each ship type, it involved a lot of trial and error last night, but I’m very happy with the result.  Because I’m pooling the bullets, the game runs at a smooth 60fps with 700 ships and 3,000+ bullets flying around.

Other things I accomplished this past week was designing all of the font characters and getting text to function properly and efficiently in-game.  I also did a lot of tweaking to get sprite-batching working perfectly (in order to draw hundreds of objects with a single draw() call – both textured and non-textured).  I also just recently enabled touch input (to shoot) and have to soon enable the other two buttons on the screen – strafing and “pause”.

To Do:

By the time for the next game update post (Monday) I hope to have the following all good and done:

1. Bullets to respond to collisions with ships.
2. “Animation” for the ships (when they get shot at) and for certain bullets (that leave a trail).
3. Have enemies take damage and be able to be destroyed.
4. Individual enemy classes (right now all the code for every enemy is in one giant file with lot’s of switch statements).
5. Personalized fire-rates and aggression levels for each enemy.
6. Some performance tweaks and modifications.

I would also like to add the final element to the HUD, the “minimap” feature, but I don’t believe that’ll be on my immediate to-do list for a little while more.  It’s not going to be like a typical minimap and will instead show small indicators around the perimeter of the screen to show the location of enemies and objectives.  It seems like it will be simple enough to implement, I’m just hoping it won’t be too CPU-intensive.

Paranoia 2

Paranoia 2 is coming along nicely.  I tend to work on it a little each morning and because of the nature of this skit, much of the animation is already done.  I’m also screen-capturing every single time I work on it, so in the end I’ll also be uploading a “making of” video to Youtube, too.  (I’ll probably split it up into three or so parts since it might be a bit on the long side, even though the video itself is sped up.)

Alright, that’s it for this week.  Go away now.

Hey guys, update time!

Well, while this is an update, there’s not much to it though.  The past week or two have been pretty messy in terms of my daily routine / schedule – so not much is getting done in any department.  However, I have started buckling down and getting some work done in the development of Space Fruit.

Yes, Space Fruit.  If Paul hadn’t fallen off the face of the Earth (again) I’d expect a witty retort from him as the number one comment to this game title.

As you can see from the screenshot, however, the name is justifiable.  It is a game set in space, and there are what appear to be fruits flying around – thus, Space Fruit.

Right now I have all of the ships, bullets, and backgrounds drawn up and ready to go.  I’m now stuck in a period of advancing steps in development and then falling back three of four.  It sucks and really slows things down, but its necessary to change / scrap things when they become either too much of a pain to implement / control or if they’re just plain not fun.

I’m taking a break from the programming and designing the HUD elements in Photoshop (what you see in the screenshot).  I’m liking the layout and design so far, and with a bit more tweaking I’ll be ready to start implementing it tomorrow.

I expect things to continue to move along slowly for a little while longer as I continue to grasp the basics of not only a different programming language, but of a different gaming platform.  Oh, and not to mention OpenGL.

In other news, I’m beginning work on the second episode of Paranoia.  Cool, huh?

Hey guys, a quick update on Defective.  As you know, last week it was released on ShootingGamesFree.org – the sponsor’s website.  After a week of exclusivity, you can now play the game on NewGrounds and Kongregate.  Go check it out and don’t forget to vote, please – it helps me out a lot!

In other news…

So what have I been doing these past two weeks?  Nothing terribly exciting.  I have a really good grasp on programming games for Android using Eclipse/Java and Open GL ES 1.1.

As a result, I’ve been laying down the basic foundation for my first mobile game, which as of right now I intend to be a multi-directional space shooter, somewhat like Defective.  The main differences being the art-style, which will heavily resemble older 8-bit games, as well as the actual gameplay, which will be much simpler and share many elements with arcade games like Galaga and Bosconian.

Right now I’m doing a lot of stress-testing and tweaking to get things to perform perfectly.  The art you see in the screenshot is temporary, and I only drew it up just to get away from all the placeholder squares I had moving around.  How similar the final game art will be to this art is still unknown.

Right now however, things look very promising.  On a mobile device, I have 1,000 alpha’d objects flying around, rotating and everything, at a solid 50+ fps – this with no optimizations at all (aka batching).  I’m really starting to love OpenGL – it makes me want to give Stage3D another chance now that I have a basic idea of how GPU-based programming works.