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[JamesGecko]

'Ello all!

At long last, I have been assigned the homework assignment of "make some sort of game type thing", with a catch... it must be complete by midnight on the 27th! Ten days to plot and scheme!

Clearly this merits some sort of topic so you can view my grand plans and horrendous failure!

First objective is to KISS. Complexity is apparently a big source of fail when combined with time limits. To this end, I'll limit myself to three objects.

Second objective is pretty. I'm no artist, but theft is the sincerest form of flattery! ...or something to that extent?
Graphical style: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigsource/3382678778/ (Sorry Cactus!)
Music:



Third objective is to make something fun to play. Due to the limited time, I'm going to try to start with a bare bones set of game rules with an additional "oh, I actually have time to implement this now!" stuff which can be added on later.

Object number one: You. You are a box.
Object number two: A more different sort of box. Several of these suckers will move in the the edges of the screen and idly slide across it. You can touch them to destroy them and get points.
Object number three: Death! Every time you touch a box, four bullets appear at opposite edges of the screen and move toward the place where the box died at high velocity. When they hit the coords, they slow down. This will hopefully keep several bullets on the screen at once.

I may have possibly been subconsciously inspired by Xwung and Solar Wolf.

Sweet things which might be added:
- Boxes which rotate. Everything should be spinning, ideally.
- Rain.
- A bonus multiplier.
- Synced bullets which all hit the center point at the same time.
- Title screen and high score.
- Bullets which enter the screen based on the angle the box was rotated when it kicked the bucket.
- Music and sound effects!

Obviously, it also needs a catchy name. I'll call it "theme:rain" for now so that it won't roll off the tongue and nobody will accidentally find it on Google.

There you have it! Lots of planning and absolutely nothing to show for it yet. I have no idea how this will work. It's like PyWeek, but with C++, OpenGL, and a ton of other unrelated classwork!

[deathtotheweird]

Title screen and high score.

ok. where do I sign up?

[JamesGecko]

So, here's what came out in 10 days. The bonus multiplier never got put in, so there's not much point to ramming a lot of boxes at once to get a lot of bullets on the screen, which sort of breaks the gameplay a bit.

And yes, text is broken and the game doesn't run at a constant speed. Blarg!



Download

Any thoughts? I'd like whack it into something worth releasing outside this thread.

[JaJitsu]

didnt work for me.

[JamesGecko]

didnt work for me.

D-:

Did it just crash, or was there a slightly more specific error message?

[JaJitsu]

"The application has failed to start because glut32.dll was not found"

maybe its a vista error 

[deathtotheweird]

http://www.xmission.com/~nate/glut.html

no, he forget to include the glut package with the game.

just get it from the above site or the direct link below (unzip into same dir as the exe):

http://www.xmission.com/~nate/glut/glut-3.7.6-bin.zip

[JamesGecko]

Oops, forgot about that. Zip updated.

[deathtotheweird]

good good. um. is the game supposed to be so fast? i don't have a way to monitor fps atm but it seems to be really high (unlimited?).

as soon as I start, i die with no more than 5 seconds on starting no matter what i do. very bad. please tell me it's a bug  very interesting in playing this

[JamesGecko]

Actually... it's because I didn't have time to figure out how to separate the logic from the game rendering code. Fixed now.

Here is a link to the updated exe if you don't want to redownload the whole thing.

[deathtotheweird]

yikes this game is terribly difficult. too many boxes makes it quite impossible to not die within .2 seconds ... I played for the last 15 minutes and it was pure luck I lasted more than 3 seconds. 

perhaps if you halved the amount of bullets or boxes it would make it easier, or at least a difficulty level. maybe change the size of the boxes would make it easier, or spread them out better.

I like the idea, and don't mind the graphics at all. Of course, I suck at bullet-dodging and shmup games. Maybe someone who is decent at them could offer their insight.

[JamesGecko]

It's worth noting that I did play quite a lot of Bullet Time the night before developing most of this. But 2 seconds? Wow, maybe I didn't fix the timing thing after all.

The ideal strategy seems to be to to use lots of diagonal movement and be very selective about what blocks you take out. I not a huge fan of having to always mash two directional buttons for normal movement, but I'm not sure how to fix it. I tried having the blocks come in diagonally, and it looked neat, but the motion seemed harder to memorize and predict, and I died a ton more. My high score is 1900, by the way. ;-)

A huge chunk of the difficulty seems to come because it's in large part a fast-paced memory game. The other chunk is that it's impossible if you ram a lot of blocks at once. I may need to decrease the hitbox even more and slow the game down to make that sort of thing reasonably survivable.