Hoshi tech demo

Hoshi is moving rapidly, I've now got a tech demo ready which you can download here (557KB).

The aim is simply to kill all 20 ships. The AI is fully implemented but not properly balanced yet and they sometimes shoot in mysterious directions. However they do usually target your direction and despite having no swarm mechanics do tend to act in a swarm-like behaviour.

I've mostly been playing against 50 ships when doing testing and that can prove quite difficult. You shouldn't reach 50 ships for a long while in the main game though.

Tips are to just keep moving as much as possible, but not TOO fast or you'll outrun your bullets and run the risk of smashing into ships. If you die (energy bar is at the bottom) the demo will exit. You only get one life. ;o)

Currently things go a bit weird at the edges of the level. For one the AI will get confused and start flying in the opposite direction, ships on the opposite side won't be drawn and bullets don't have "move to correct side" parts attached. So, if you see a big red line, I suggest flying away from it, although nothing will go spectacularly wrong if you don't.

In other news, I did a fair bit of yesterday and today's development under Linux, where the game just runs. I'll write a post about my reasons for choosing C# and OpenTK (this being a main one) at some point. For now, you can see what it looks like here, ignore the tearing, that's just a vsync issue. I'd not quite got the radar implemented there, so no red spots.

I tried to take a video of the tech demo earlier but ran into some issues unfortunately. I'll try again later though.

Game A Month Project #1 and #2

So, I've only decided in the past couple of days to go for this game-a-month thing and I already have 2 projects currently on the go.

These consist of the earlier spoken about Whirligig and also a re-re-make of Hoshi.

Whirligig I've not worked on since the tech demo, except to do some testing. I can confirm it works with more than 2 players, but it is the bigger of these two projects so, despite starting it first it will take longer. Also I used it as the test bed for a lot of the framework I'm developing for use in my game-a-month project and I spent over a week getting this working to a satisfactory and easily reusable standard. However, when I started work on Hoshi, this meant I could just drop in a lot of this framework with very little change and now I have two games where I just had one two days ago. Perhaps I'll release some of this framework afterwards, we'll see.

A little more on Hoshi here: when I first found OpenTK one of the first things I wrote for it was a re-write of my uni game Hoshi. Again I got around 75% of the development and then discovered I'd made a huge (and I mean huge) error with how I was translating all the objects around the screen. Untangling this mess would have taken as long again as a total rewrite, so I essentially left it there. There are some videos of the engine on youtube. So, I'm once again re-making the game I put so many hours into as a kid. Right now I have a starry sky (just a quick note, the word hoshi in Japanese -- kanji 星 -- means 'star') and a ship that can fly around it. I have ship designs for the enemy ships in place and I haven't mucked up the positioning system yet. I'd say I'm around 70% of the way to a tech demo with it and around 50% of the way to a full game.

So, those are my current two dates. Hoshi I estimate will be ready sometime in May, I'm going to say provisionally the 16th, since it's my birthday and this was one of my favourite games. ;o)

Whirligig will take longer as I've more plans for it, mid to late June is probably a fair estimate.

Whirligig

Whirligig is a small artillery game I'm currently working on.
The basic idea takes from an old, old game called Gravity Wars which involves two stationary ships arranged between several planets where the idea is to shoot your opponent and the planets have gravitational effect on your projectiles.

I've taken other ideas, mainly from an old RISC OS game called TANKS, although the concepts are similar to those used in Worms, that is different types of weapons.

Currently I have the game running as a short tech demo (~2.4MB) between two players with infinite "split" weapons and a video on youtube from earlier in development.

Small technical notes on the game: it uses OpenTK and is written in C#.

I'm also building as much of the internals of the game in a re-usable fashion so I can use them in other projects as well, as I'll explain in my next post.