LudumData

Power Grab: Day… 4?

[raw] LD27MiniLD 25. Jul 2013 · 23:18 UTC · 28 days before compo start by MiniBobbo · 0

So I made some good progress today.  I redid all the art I’d made so far to make it all… worse, actually.

powergrabsprites

I went with some extremely simple pixrel art because while the other mediocre art looked better it would take me much longer to animate.  If I have to choose between smooth animation and nice graphics I’ll choose the animation every time.  The pixel graphics scale better anyways and look nicer with the “dynamic” camera.

Once I decided to go with the pixel art it was obvious I should write a simple particle system.  So now there are explosions when you decide to shoot something.

Speaking of shooting something, I also implemented the bullet code, so now all the fire that you throw at your opponent actually does something to him.  I lost a lot of time trying to find a bug in the code that caused some bullets to do absolutely nothing when they reached their destination.  Every time I debugged it worked fine, but in play it didn’t.  After beating my head against the wall for a little while I found that I had some left over code when I was playing around with bullets early on that moved them but never checked for hits.  So every bullet that happened to reach the target in the properly implemented code worked great and all the other ones failed.  So that explains the 50% success rate.

And finally, I wrote a quick builder AI who builds and repairs units all over the map to give you something to shoot at.

demo2

Up next…

Defensive structures!

Right sized power stations!

A computer opponent that will actually shoot back!

Demo here: JAR file

Instructions here: TXT

Comments

zzForrest
26. Jul 2013 · 11:57 UTC
The build mode is actually kind of fun, in a strange way. Were it better explained what each thing did, I would quite like it. The problem, though, is the ‘attack’ mode. I guess all of my settlement that I just built poofed into thin air because attack mode seems to make you disappear from the face of the map. The next time I ran it, though, it seemed that I couldn’t even get nodes building. Then I found out, if you zoom in enough, the screen flips. Then I found, if you zoom out far enough, you could find all of the battle units just sitting there, actually functioning ( as opposed to battle mode, where you can’t do anything with them ). Strangely enough, you could actually build nodes for them. If this game actually worked ( although that is putting it really harshly ), then this would be great. It seems you have some bugs to rough out. Just to recap what those are:

Zooming in can flip the screen

Battle arena can be accessed without battle mode

When battle arena is accessed like this, you can attack the enemy, whereas in battle mode, you can’t

When not in battle mode, you can build for enemy settlements

If you switch to battle mode before you have built anything for yourself, you cannot build anymore

When zooming out, the tiling freaks out and causes lines to appear everywhere. I suggest adding an extra pixel to sprites so that gaps don’t appear.

I know I’m being harsh here, because you have something really cool going, but it needs work. I hope to see you finish an entry!