OK, I've gotten quite a bit further with the ship editor now, and have gone as far as implementing a couple of new ship components in order to increase the variety of test configurations available. One of the important things that's changed is the addition of a proper engine type. Up until now, the main weapon component also served as a thruster for simplicity's sake. There's also a new structural wing-type element (which looks much better than the old strut type), and I've redrawn the generator type to fit into the new graphic scheme more effectively.
The screenshots only show two weapons: the standard cannon and basic laser type. One of the things I need to do in the near future is create a proper ship weapon that implements the lightning weapon in a specified arc (rather than hitting absolutely everything as the test implementation did).
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| That laser effect still needs some sexing up. It's on my todo list. |
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| After a bit of improvement of the spawning framework I have once again gotten the laser weapon to leave a set of custom explosions at the point where it intersects the environment. |
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| The white lines that you can see between certain Scourge spores are for debugging some of the swarming algorithms, and obviously will normally be invisible. I plan to redraw that turret weapon as well, it no longer fits in with the new ship parts that well. |
Make the baddies crashing into each other knock them off course and damage them.
ReplyDeleteI thought about making the Scourge interact with each other physically, but with the swarm sizes (up to 2000 atm) the computational expense would be pushing it a bit, and it would be much harder to design the swarming behaviour.
ReplyDeleteHowever, there will be a fair number of weapons/effects that *do* interact with them, such as explosive projectiles that impart force within a radius. Another example is the (not yet implemented) Singularity Cannon, which will fire a small black hole that pulls enemies towards it before exploding.
Yes it's expensive and hard, but it'd be worth it, every game of this type has enemies on patterns or just swarming to you. Make them hit each other and suddenly they become more than just an independant target, you will find the enjoyment of seeing them as individuals, you'll have opportunities to use bottlenecks in the landscape as a real defence, or maybe fire back an individual enemy with the blast radius as described and watch as it slams back into the oncoming swarm causing a comedy pileup. it'd turn yet another shootemup into the shootemup version of destruction derby. This'd go toward giving the enemies more character meaning you don't need 2000 anymore. Besides, computers are fast, it's doable.
ReplyDeleteI'll consider it, but there's already plenty to set Juggernaut apart from a normal shooter in terms of exploration and RPG elements. I also tend to think that, from a graphic perspective, it does a look a bit better if the swarm members can physically overlap.
ReplyDeleteHowever, even if I don't add that feature to the general swarms in the end, it will definitely be present for the larger and less frequent enemies.
I do want to say that I really appreciate the input and ideas, though :)
I enjoy programming games, and I like the feedback thing, I know it inspired me if chrisy was suggesting things. I know what's easy or hard in code and for the machines but more importantly whats fun to play. I also used to make games on blitz basic, ahh good ol amiga days....
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