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[Tiny]

Right, so a week or so ago I started to work on a Shmup since I've wanted to make one for a while but never got the chance to actually to it. Just a few days after that, my colleague Bezzy here tells me about this competition and of course I had to join. The game wasn't supposed to contain anything procedurally generated but I had to come up with some stuff so bear with me.

End goal:
I'd like to have a game that has generated enemy ships, movement paths, weapons and difficulty levels.

Current state:
During the last few days I've worked a lot on the actual game engine. I'm using SFML and FMOD and I got a pretty stable base up and running. I also managed to get a pretty good generation of movement paths going. I'm using NURBS for the movement and currently the ships get randomized paths which are pretty good actually. They can loop around the screen, sweep in, sweep out, do crazy formation crossings, etc.   

Next step for me is to create a wave manager thingy that keeps track of what ships are on screen and how much should be launched based on the current difficulty level. I also want to create some sort of randomly generated formations of ships.

The difficulty thing I had in mind was to have a dynamic difficulty level. Right now the NURBS used for enemy movement are of varied difficulty and can be anything from a simple line going a cross the screen to 4 ships sweeping in from every corner of the screen and looping around the player. What I had in mind was to dynamically change the difficulty level based on how much damage the player takes and does and with that decide how many ships should be included in upcoming waves and what kind of formations and paths they should have.

Anyways, another thought I had was to evolve the ships. Since they would be generated and modified from wave to wave, and since the play will have several weapons, I was thinking that some ships would get more resistant or immune to some weapons, based on how much they are used. Another idea would be to destroy the enemy ships part by part (i.e. the player would be able to blow up first the wings, then the hull, etc. )

That's what I had to say for now. If you did manage to read all the text, I'm going to reward you with an awesome screenshot of my NURBS paths in action.

[increpare]

I take it that the sprites in that sshot were manually done?

and: I'm guessing I should think of nurbs paths as cool, but I don't think i've seen anyone use them before, so I'm going to have to hold off for a demo before I know what to make of them 

[Tiny]

Oh yeah, haha, the sprites are made by my skillful hands.

I don't really feel comfortable putting up a demo that only lets you press a button and watch my "ships" fly by, heh. But if I can sort the formation stuff soon, I might be able to have something playable in the next couple of days

[jph wacheski]

souns like some fun,. nice curves for flight pathes are a pleasure to watch.  hpoe we see a demo soon,.

[Tiny]

Update:

Right, so I'm completely done with the whole path randomizing algorithm. I got some pretty nifty NURBS giving the enemy ships some nice curved movement. I wonder how that will look when the ships start shooting and stuff.

I've started implementing what will be the final graphics, which is a dark background with ships made out of flat colored rectangles or other shapes. This sounds boring but not so much when they glow like x-mas lights. I spent 13 hours last sunday to write some neat glsl shaders that abuses bloom in a very exaggerated way. The ships look awesome, except for the fact that they are just rectangles now.

I've also finished the dynamic difficulty level thingy, which makes sure there are more enemies and more complex paths for the enemies to follow when the difficulty gets higher.

Currently I'm trying to finalize my ship generating algorithm to make some nice cool ships out of the boring glowing rectangles.

I'll try to make a demo out of all this soon, but I kinda want to implement shooting first. Cause otherwise you would just move around and watch my beautiful shaders do the work but you wouldn't be able to kill anything, and that's just boring.