BitRoamer

I’m working on a new game. I’ve decided to find a way around the areas I’m least talented in (2D graphics and drawing) and supplement it with stuff that I am talented in (procedural visual effects).

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Gravity Induced distortion effects


I wanted to make what looks like gravity wells and other gravity induced distortion to my background grid and this is how it’s turned out. I’m using newton’s law of gravitational attraction to loop through each pixel and find the forces that would be acting on it. Then I had to add a way to blend the neutral color into the distorted colors, otherwise I would get very noticeable noncontinuous jumps. What I didn’t realize until I looked it up this morning (after already getting an equation in place but some weird artifacting lead me to search out reasons why), did I realize I had independently come up with the equation for Alpha blending! It turns out that I had typo-d the variable that is suppose to be containing my lerp value (which acts as the alpha value) with another, similarly name variable, meaning that my logic was sound. So that was pretty cool! What a relief!

 

lerp: linear interpolation. This should be in the range of 0.0 to 1.0 However mine were going outside of that, the first time I debugged I noticed a 4.xx and knew that I had been doing math somewhere wrong long before this point of the code.

BitRoamer Update – XI

BitRoamer Update:

Changelog

  • Background Grid added!
  • Controls: Mouse reinstated

 

BitRoamer Update – X

BitRoamer Update:

Changelog

  • Controls change. Mouse is no longer used

 

BitRoamer Update – IX

BitRoamer Update:

Changelog

  • Enemy meleers move faster than player
  • Added a melee weapon! Press space bar to use it

 

Commence to jigglin

I got my hands on a pretty cool program that lets me make 2D animations. I’ve chopped up a couple pictures and animated them just to get my feet wet.

Below you’ll see the still and then the animation I was able to rig up from it.


BitRoamer Update-VIII

I’m excited about this update. It’s the first time BitRoamer feels like a game. Move fast enough to grab the health before it times out while avoiding the hordes.

Changelog

  • Enemy melee-ers (aka “hordees”) now move at a constant rate
  • Item drops have a lifetime of 5 seconds before they disappear.
  • Enemies spawn in waves now, a new wave isn’t spawned until all the previous wave’s enemies are dead

 

Todo:

  • Add “ammo” pickup
    • change the players ammo to a finite resource
  • Add player melee
    • new input key
    • animation
    • no ammo for this (obviously)
  • Enemy melee should do more damage than a shooter
  • Change fire rate of player so that it is constant, with a bit more wait between each bullet, and add a reload after every 8th bullet, with a current “Clip” count label or icon.
    • Reload indicator kind of looks like cell phone reception bars or MGS bars
  • Add pathfinding so that enemies can move around each other.

BitRoamer Update-VII

 

BitRoamer update

  • Changed health drop to be more frequent
  • player now moves 2/5 as fast as before
  • Enemies now have a 15% chance to be a shooter
    • Non-shooter enemies are 3x faster
    • Non-shooter enemies are considered “melee” enemies
  • Added melee enemies
    • Melee enemies “bump” into the player as their melee action and reduce player’s health
  • Added score label
    • Player gets a major score for killing enemies
    • Player gets a minor score for picking up items
  • MobSpawners reduced to 1.
    • Enemies spawn at an exponential rate
  • Player bullets get removed at their first impact

Todo:

  • Add “ammo” pickup
    • change the players ammo to a finite resource
  • Add player melee
    • new input key
    • animation
    • no ammo for this (obviously)
  • Enemy melee-ers should move at a constant speed instead of the discrete movements currently
  • Enemy melee should do more damage than a shooter
  • Change fire rate of player so that it is constant, with a bit more wait between each bullet, and add a reload after every 8th bullet, with a current “Clip” count label or icon.
    • Reload indicator kind of looks like cell phone reception bars or MGS bars
  • Add pathfinding so that enemies can move around each other.
  • Slow down the rate of spawning so that new waves don’t come out until the old wave is gone

BitRoamer Update-VI

New BitRoamer update

  • added randomization to mob spawner sprite
  • add health-drop sprite
  • add ability to collect health drops and refill players health
  • health-drops gravitate towards player
  • Enemies now have a 15% chance of dropping a health item when killed. This is too infrequent.

BitRoamer Update-V

BitRoamer Updates:

  • Turned the mobspawner sprite effect into a singleton class which makes it run more effeciently but reduces the number of independent effects to one that is shared by all spawners. More than one and performance was impacted significantly.
  • Added a pulse to the mobspawner sprite

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