CC-003 - Nautical Nonsense

[Sirocco]

So here's the basic idea: Vampire is "sailing" across the desert at night, under the power of his thralls. And obviously he wants to get to his destination before daylight. So he needs to feed his thralls candy at specific intervals to keep them motivated. Also, they are fickle, and their preferred candy changes over time.

This is a rhythm mini-game with a symbol matching element. You need to time your candy feeding to the beat, but also make sure the candy matches what they want. Get it right, and you speed up. Get it wrong, and you slow down.

I've never worked within this genre before, so it should be interesting.

[Sirocco]

We're doing this little thing called a pivot. Gameplay now involves launching pumpkins like cannonballs. I have a space set up with parallax scrolling (12 layers), screen projection so sprites approach the screen smoothly, and some other random nonsense. More to come.

[Sirocco]

I spent a good bit today playing with the projection settings, and getting things looking right with the parallax layers. I'm not 100% sold on it, but this is the direction I'm going, so I'll make it work. I got in projectile launching (pumpkin cannons) and collision detection, along with simple animation when shots hit a ship. Hopefully tomorrow I'll put in some more time.

This is turning out to be less of a design challenge than a technical one Getting everything to look "just so" has been rather tricky, but makes me appreciate games like Space Harrier.

[Sirocco]

Now with.... stuff.

[Sirocco]

Now with skeleton tossing, for your viewing enjoyment.

[Sirocco]

Got some solid work done this afternoon. I have enemy ships automatically spawning off-screen, and tracking into the playable area. They will currently randomly wander, stopping to shuffle about for a bit before picking a new way-point. They have the ability to fire upon the player, but not the intelligence to track the player for a good shot. I'll have them preemptively slide forward/backward to put them into a firing position if they 'see' the player is near them.

Long-range shots are colored differently, with a purple aura, and hit harder. Firing direction is determined by the last direction you moved in. This seems lazy, but I was concerned with having 3 or 4 buttons for firing control, and that really seems a bit much. Doing this reduces it to two buttons: one for short range, the other for long range. I haven't had any difficulties snapping off shots in my testing this evening.

With tomorrow, and two more weekends before the end of the compo, I need to have more days like today

[Sirocco]

Getting down to brass tacks now. I'm not going to crunch like I did last time (which was legit awful). I need to finish up the tutorial and game over screens, and then I can continue polishing until I get tired or run out of time.

[Sirocco]

Almost done with my entry. I was close to finishing last night, but couldn't quite make the final push. I had already rolled through a twelve hour dev session and the ol' body just gave the fuck out.

Goal is to have the entry done mid-week, with a last bit of polish. I need to tweak enemy firing rate (which is way too fast!), touch up the tutorial screen, and construct some sort of "game over" screen with both useful and useless metrics like score, shot count, accuracy, etc. I might even bring over my high-score code from the first 4x4x4 entry. I also need to put some detail on the ships, because as of right now they are literally flat, one color sprites. That sorta works, but not really.... compared to the rest of the scene.

[Sirocco]

My compo entry is ready to go. Playable windows binary. Source is available if anyone wants to mess around with it.

CC-003 Vampirates of the Scaribbean