No posts for so long! I’ve been very distracted lately and haven’t put any time into game dev recently. Yesterday, however, I was really feeling the itch to dev something and just decided I would crank out a tiny little game until it was playable. I was expecting it to take about 2 hours, but ended up spending 4 last night getting it all working. It is extremely bare bones right now: it looks TERRIBLE and only the most basic of features are in. Still, it is ‘playable’, which was the goal.
As you should come to expect, it is built using the MUA framework, with initial playability somewhere in the 500 lines area. I figure I can use it as the source for one of the framework complete-game tutorials. With that in mind I’ve been saving off the different steps as I go. I’m not sure if this is a great idea or a terrible one; it seems like it rides primarily on how much I refactor my code along the way.
I was going to post a picture, but like I said, it is visually atrocious, so I’m going to just save that for the tutorial pages. For now, you just get to know that it is what I call a 1D thrust game (I have no idea if that is a community-accepted term): the game scrolls and you fight gravity with your vertical thrust to navigate the terrain you are moving through. I’ve already ‘broken’ this though – the last feature I added was the ability to temporarily fly forward or drop back to help navigate some of the harder sections.
Additionally, making this one has given me some inspiration for a space bullet hell game (what is it with me and space flyers/shooters?) As usual, I’ll try to round up some artists for that and blog it when I finally get to it.