Project Nimoy : Short Week, Extended Design

It's been a very short week for me so I only managed to get in about two days of work. I owe this to a clash between two sides of myself, the "this is a learning project so don't spend too much time on it" and the "if I putting this out there it's gotta be something I'm proud of". The latter won without much dispute.

Adding the lasers in introduced a new element by giving the play something other to do than simply dodging enemies and grabbing fuel pickups, but it still wasn't enough. And it made it like every other scroller out there. I want to do something different, because the only client to please is myself.

Ahh the joys of Indy.

I decided that rather than having the enemies just kamikaze at your ship, they actually launch those little green sacs attached to their bodies at you, which explode before they reach you and send out little projectiles.

I've given the player a Shield, which is active only when the Fuel Gauge is near Max, giving more incentive to keeping it full. Also, this Shield stops the enemy projectiles from hitting the ship, though they do slowly deplete the shield.

I said that enemies accumulate at the top of the screen. They also respawn sacs to launch at the player. This can result in a constant hail of projectiles. However, these can actually benefit the player.

If the Sacs are hit by the player's Laser, the projectiles actually fire back at the enemies, destroying them in one hit as they are more powerful than the lasers.

I think the player's Laser will be ineffective against the Aliens, meaning the player's only offense will be to use their sacs against them....(if you saw some of the Variable names I used in code you will understand why I should have called them "blobs" or "balloons" instead).

Anyway, I will post this at the end of next week, hopefully in a state I can call "complete". I know it's an extension of the original timeline but no one's signing my cheques at this point.

Project Nimoy : Second Milestone

I've posted my second version of the game here.

A quick changelist:

• sped up the background speed
• did some tuning to the player movement
• added lasers that deplete when used too much
• added new art for player, aliens and gas clouds
• added a parachute animation for when the player runs out of fuel
• moved HUD elements around
• added new sounds
• cleaned up some code (you'll have to trust me on that)

Next week I'm going to do a final polish to AI and movement. I really want to try and add a screen shake every time the player gets hit by an enemy, and a small into sequence showing the scientists getting into the rocket as it blasts off, but I'll see if I have time for that before Friday.

Bike Lights and Olympic Nights

My girlfriend and I grabbed our cameras and tripod and headed out to photograph the vector light exhibit here at the olympics.

While shooting photos I decided to grab the light off my bike and do a little light painting to show some olympic spirit. Sadly my attempt at a maple leaf didn't go quite as well.

Animation and Xbox Woes

I decided to take a stab at actually making an animation for the aliens. This was the result after about an hour and a half of work.

I didn't like the way it looked as the animation looks to cycled so I decided to separate the animations for the tentacles and the eyeball. I also added a "downward look", so rather than the animation cycling it stops at the last animation when the eye looks down. This way in game it looks like the eyeball has spotted the player and it attacks just as the animation finishes.

My Xbox also crapped out on me. Surprisingly not the Red Ring Of Death. The heat generated from about 4 hours of playing Mass Effect 2 (or maybe it's just that my game skills are so damn hot) the glue on a small magnet above the disc tray melted, dropping the magnet onto the disc and making a very loud noise. The tray now refuses to close. This is a(nother) known Xbox issue, and since it's past warrenty I'm going to have to open it up and fix my $300 next generation console system with a tube of $2 SuperGlu.

Project Nimoy : First Milestone

Last week went a lot better than expected in terms of learning Action Script 3.0. I found an excellent tutorial on the setting up Flixel and using its code. It definitely does a great job of taking out the bulk of the programming and allows you to focus more on the gameplay.

I managed to get a first (milestone? pre-alpha? prototype?) version of the game complete. All the gameplay elements are there, including a victory and loss state. Most of the time was spent learning the ins and outs of the Flixel engine, but there's still a lot to learn.

The game needs a LOT of polish, movement tuning and AI work, sounds and music, transitions....a lot. But I'm pretty stoked I managed to get a first version done and published.

You can check it out here .

I'll keep posting project updates and new versions. I'd like to have this finished by the end of next week.

Hopefully Mass Effect 2 doesn't get in the way too much.

Time Flies

I felt I should update this blog as it's my method of keeping track of time when I no longer have the work week to set my internal clock by. December 11th was my last post. Since then, aside from the chaos of the holidays I've been working on another side project for a friend starting a new company. It was mainly design concept work, but I spent a lot of time working with Premiere and After Effects which was excellent practice. For now that venture is on hold so I can return to what I was doing before the holidays.

I also played a lot of Space Hulk. I will have to blog about that separately.

I've decided to stop work on Action Script 2.0 and move on to 3.0. It's more versatile, more structured, and I'm going to need to learn it anyway if I'm going to be making Flash games in the future.

Right now I'm blazing through a great tutorial which sound set the ground work Project Nimoy. I should be able to get a decent first version running next week, so I'll post that as soon as it's up.

On a side note, I'm enjoying Eve Online because I can load it up on my laptop, park my Ore Harvester near and asteroid and hit the "Mine" button while I do work on my PC. Very little distraction, and it only enhances the "space ship" vibe I have going on in my little dark office space.