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[bnhw]

The Vastness of the Cosmos

Description An open-ended, ambient, space-navigation game. The protagonist, an unfortunate astronaut who ends up alone in space, propels him/herself from asteroid to asteroid. The game will include realistic gravitational physics. I'm aiming for a format to embed in a webpage, so likely either Flash/Flex or Processing/ProcessingJS. I think the real trick to this game will be a non-intrusive control system and fitting soundtrack.		Inspired by

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[bnhw]

I've started to hack the game out in Processing. Although there are some nice games engines for Flash, I decided that it might be more valuable to have an example of a Processing games engine for other aspiring developers.

I've made some progress with the physics engine: gravity and collision-handling. There's a known bug-by-design, but otherwise it's mostly working to spec.

Physics prototype

Another thing I've been doing is trying to work out how the game will play. The current concept is to directly control the astronaut's arms with the mouse; essentially, once you're within arm's reach of an asteroid, you can click-and-drag to propel yourself. I've also got more ideas for gameplay, but I'll have to see how much time I have--I've kept this intentionally minimal in scope so far.

[mcccclean]

This sounds interesting... I'm always oddly drawn to games with "ambient" in their list of adjectives.

Controlling with the arms sounds like it'd be pretty cool. Looking forward to seeing how that plays.