A good beginning...

Midterm

Is a halfway a battle won.

So, we have not only survived half the period, but also the supposed end of the world. Not letting some Internet downtime keep us down for long, a bit after we initially planned, we can finally make our midway point blogpost.

We are now halfway our project—or we very well should be—, so let’s have a look on how far we’ve really gotten.

What we have

Bluntly put, we have a working game engine. There is a fully-functioning, driving, shooting (with actual bullets that actually come out and do damage; shock and awe) tank, destructible walls, collision detection and background slash game world. We even included some very rudimentary enemies in the form of disembodied turrets that track the player across the screen and start firing whenever he enters a certain range. The level ends when all enemies are destroyed, after which the game promptly resets (so we still need a game over screen). We have a pause menu with retry, back to menu and exit buttons.

So essentially we have a moderately playable product that is still missing some minor polish in the form of some menus.

What we don't have; or what we're working on; or what we're definitely not doing, ever

We feel the current graphics of the game are still a bit… old-school, however. Whereas we keep the grid structure that we use in our level loading, some members of our team are devising a system that will hopefully give the game a cleaner, more natural look, by literally cutting corners of the background sprites and programming the level loading in such a way that the blocks arrange themselves in a logical manner.

As we were unsatisfied with the way the destructible environment works, one of our members quickly proposed a Worms-esque blast-radius based destruction mechanic. As he had some experience with working with pixel related collision detection (as opposed to the bounding box based kind we use now), he believes it will cost relatively little effort to implement this in the current game.

After cursory research on network support we got the distinct feeling we might not have the experience and time required to make multiplayer happen. And after hearing people with experience lament on the difficulty of networks, that feeling evolved to certainty. We’re dropping online multiplayer.

Instead, we’ll be focussing on our backup plan: enemy AI. An AI that is smart enough to give chase, pursue the main objective and lead a target, with different behavioural patterns for different enemies.

So, in place of a basic multiplayer mode, we’ll be making an extensive single player mode, with different types of enemies, powerups, bosses, environment, etc. The idea will be the same: protect your pudding from the enemy, but the more focussed approach will most likely result in a more polished and enjoyable experience.

Since settling on the name “Pudding Protectors: Idatakimasu!”, we have likewise defined a more definite style. Contrary to our original clean, close to realistic idea, we will be following a more stylised, Japanese and over the top feel.

Concept art for the different enemies and player tanks is full in the works, and ideas for powerups, bosses and levels are bubbling amongst our members. In order to homogenise the art style, we are working hard to make everything look clearer and smoother.

So our plan is as follows: First polish the basics, since you can’t build a strong game on weak foundations. So finish the menus, tighten up the backgrounds, overhaul the environment and tweak the hit and collision detection.

Then—and this is easily said, but probably not quite as easily done—create an AI. First we’ll create a rudimentary one that we can tweak to suit our needs, then we’ll define the different enemy types and implement them with each their own behaviour. We’ve had discussions on how to handle this, and several of our members have definite ideas and plans for the implementation, so hopes and faith are high.

After we are done with that—or at least that we are certain that we are almost finished—and we have idle members, we start programming powerups, which we have already largely defined.

Simultaneously, as not all our assets will be spent on creating the powerups, we create the sprites necessary for the different enemies and player models, so all art is comparable across the game.

Lastly, when the style is set and the entire game is in a playable state and our AI works as desired, and we have a number of levels, we add bosses at the end of the levels. Because this is something we feel will add a lot to our game, but it is hardly required, it is one of the last things we plan to do.

I, for one, would love to play our finished product. Let’s see if we can get there.