Bullet consumption
June 21, 2008 at 3:08 pm | In Flash games, Game development, Game idea's, HaXe | Leave a CommentI’ve been prototyping yet another game idea during the last few weeks. Since I’m now a full-time game programmer at Triangle Studios, I have less spare time to devote to game-development. Fortunately, less doesn’t mean nothing at all. 
So here’s BulletEater. A danmaku/bullet-hell game. Except that you’re unable to fire back at turrets, so you’ll just have to survive the bullet patterns. Actually, you’re not completely defenseless: there’s an overcharge mode that allows you to eat bullets, which in turn adds to your score. It does cost you a life however, but lives slowly recharge so that’s simply a matter of surviving long enough. Eating bullets speeds up the recharge process a bit so you may want to save your lives for the really nasty situations.
These are things I’m still thinking about, as they make large bullet patterns easy score-fests instead. So I’m thinking about including laser-beams that can’t be eaten to control the difficulty and challenge some more. If you have any suggestions, feel free to share them.
How to get inspiration
January 16, 2008 at 11:25 pm | In Game development, Game idea's | 2 CommentsTags: Game idea's, ideas, inspiration, library, prototyping
Lacking inspiration?
Recently there have been some threads about ‘how to get inspiration’ on the Gamedev.net forums. Sometimes it feels as if every good idea is already taken, and that every addition or twist you come up with turns out wrong.
That was written in a game design board, but I’ve also seen it come up many times on level-design forums. Take Counter-Strike for example: so many custom maps have been created that there’s virtually no original setting left. Or Half-Life 2: try to come up with an original physics-based puzzle for once. That’s harder than it looks.
Here’s how I handle it
Surprizes and tools
January 4, 2008 at 3:55 pm | In Flash games, Game development, Game idea's, Programming | Leave a CommentTags: flash, games, puzzle, surprizes, tools
Here’s a small image hinting at the surprize I wrote about in my last post. It’s a puzzle game, it’s almost completely finished and it includes an editor. I’ll post more info about it later, once it’s fully playable and polished.
Meanwhile, I’m finishing up AI Wars – it’s almost done now, except for a few communication issues. I’ve also written a few additional Python tools. Since I’m painting quite a few tilemaps for Aural Fighter, I figured a few tools wouldn’t hurt. Today I added one that takes an image, asks for the desired tilesize, and outputs a serie of unique tiles as separate images. It’s using Python Imaging Library (PIL) to load, compare and save the images. It then optimizes them, using PngOptimizerCL, the command line version of PngOptimizer. The tool took me about an hour or two to create, and it’s less than 100 lines of code. And, except for the optimization phase, it’s quite fast, too. 
AI Wars – a side project
December 5, 2007 at 12:48 am | In Game idea's | Leave a CommentTags: AI, Flash games, Game development, games, HaXe, turn-based strategy
I promised to write about that ‘other game’. It’s a school project focussed on AI. Me and a friend are writing a turn-based strategy game similar to Advanced Wars, and some other friends are writing AI applications that can connect to our game. We’ve chosen for a Flash-based front-end, connected with a Neko-based back-end that handles the connections with the other AI apps. From there, it’s simply watching those AI agents duke it out against each other.
As for Aural Fighter, it’s slowly becoming better and more playable. I haven’t done much on it last week due to being ill, but I’ve done some things nonetheless. Most of the missile weapons are now working: the guided missiles and splash damage missiles are pretty fun to play with and they’re quite powerfull. I’ll tweak the exact values once I can playtest some of the later levels, but for now, it’s fun to blow up waves of enemies with splash damage missiles.
The first level is nearing completion, too. I only need to do some art for it and add several more enemy waves. I’m also working on the first endboss, which is going to be component-based. I’ll probably write some more on that in a later post.
Enemies approaching!
October 19, 2007 at 2:06 am | In Game idea's | 1 CommentIt’s time for another progress update about Aural Fighter. Though college is taking quite some time these days, I’m trying to spend as much time as possible on this game. This week, I’ve started work on an in-game level editor and I’ve drawn some enemy fighters and made a Python script that allows me to easily create new enemy types by simply editing a text file. This data is converted into HaXe code, so while it’s easy to modify some values, it’s also compiled as code, which means it doesn’t need to be parsed at run-time.
I’m thinking about doing different sets of enemies, each with a distinct style. This screenshot shows some of the first set I’ve been working on. It’s all still early work, but comments are welcome.
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