2013 - 2 - 2 / 7:20 pm / games
GGJ Game: Screenshot Saturday
Still poking away at this Global Game Jam game I started last weekend. If you missed the timelapse, just scroll down a little bit and you'll find it, or just click here. Here's what it's looking like at the moment:
I'm super excited about that minimap in the upper left hand corner. You have no idea how excited I am. I've been wanting to have a real time minimap in a game for so long but I've always been limited by my programming knowledge or the software that I was using to develop the games, but now I'm finally at the point where putting together that minimap on the HUD only took a few hours of work!
Another thing going on is the crazy blue splashes on the screen, which is actually just me testing my particle system. I don't seem to do particles like most people, and I prefer all my particles to be individual instances or objects in the engine... but this does mean some performance issues unless I have some sort of pooling system set up for at least the bitmapdata being used for each particle. I recently added a new parameter to my particles which is delay, so I can specify how long a particle should wait before it starts doing its thing.
I'm pretty happy with how particle and effects creation works in my latest iteration of my framework that sits on top of Flashpunk. Right now the code for creating those blue particles looks like this:
//make dem blue rings
KParticle.spawn(level.mouseX, level.mouseY, C.EFFECT_RING, {
frames: [0, 1, 2, 3, 4],
lifeSpan: [20, 40],
delay: [30, 120],
center: true,
color: C.COLOR_BLUE,
scale: [0.5, 1],
layer: -5
});
Just to clarify a few things, the C.EFFECT_RING is just a reference to a string that I've used to pool the particles ahead of time, so the function here ends up looking for the next particle in the C.EFFECT_RING pool. "C" is just my big static class for all sorts of constants that I want to be able to easily remember.
As far as the yellow and red pixels in the middle of the screen -- those are some helpful markers to show me how my camera system is working. I just got some neat camera blocking stuff working (similar to Jottobots) but it's been so long since I've coded any sort of "advanced" camera stuff that I'm feeling totally rusty and it took me probably two days of thinking to get it working the way I want. I still have some other problems to solve with that, like how to get the camera to properly block around corners, but I'll get to that soon enough. A lot of the inspiration for this comes from games like Super Metroid where the game will hide areas from the player until the player crosses into them, and then the camera will adjust to reveal the new area.
That's it for now! Trying to just post more to my blogosphere in general, so I'm going to just try and post as much as possible for the next few weeks and see how it turns out.
about
Hi there, my name is Kyle, and I'm a 27 year old kid with adult powers. I'm making video games and living the indie game developer life in Tempe, Arizona. Here you will find my thoughts, games, websites, doodles, and other stuff like that. I worked on Snapshot, Offspring Fling, and a whole bunch of other games. If you want to get a hold of me use the form on the bottom of the page, leave a comment, or just tweet at me. I try to post three times a week. Thanks for stoppin' by!
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2013 - 2 - 2 8:05 PM
NounVerber
I would love to see you talk some more game-dev.
The particels look nice, I bet they they're even better animated.
2013 - 2 - 2 8:14 PM
Kyle
Awesome! :) Hopefully if I stay productive, then I can just make a few posts a week about what I've been up to, and share some code, screenshots, or whatever.
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