Team Crucial

Almost time for ze Mini-LD #36!

Gamer and I are awfully pumped. We’ve come up with what we think is a pretty nifty idea.

It’s a simple enough concept: you’re an angel who’s somehow swapped places with a demon. You have a halo that you can launch around and bounce off stuff, and the real game mechanic is that you can teleport to the ball, allowing you to reach places you can’t reach just by jumping and walking about. First half you’ll play as the angel, second half as a demon (throwing a fireball instead), hence the contrast theme 😀

So here’s a list of stuff we need to implement and want to implement:

Need:
Platforming engine + teleportation
Ball physics (halo reacting realistically to slopes)
At least 10 levels
Character animations

Want:
Different halos or powerups
Having the halo/fireball “colour in” the world as it flies about.
More detailed character animations such as turning to face the mouse etc.
As many levels as possible
Nifty lighting stuff
Original music
A more coherent plot

I have a fairly solid concept of ball physics, so that’s what I’ll be working on first. The next step will be making a decent platformer engine, then fleshing it out into a proper engine.

Gamer is going to be working on a character design and perhaps an example level. The biggest challenge for him will be making nice neat character animations, so he’s probably going to be working on that initially.

Hopefully we haven’t bitten off more than we can chew. We can’t wait to get started tomorrow. Will be updating this post with progress 😀

(edit:)

DAY ONE – two initial tests finished!

So at the end of day one I’ve managed to hack together a pretty alright ball physics engine. It’s horrendously coded (entirely procedurally) and a bit buggy, but it was mostly so I can conceptualize the maths behind it.
Here it is:

http://www.fileize.com/view/3115e2b7-c5c/
(click and drag the ball to toss it around)

It’s based off some maths I read in a book a while ago about coordinate rotation. Essentially, you detect when a ball is touching a line (with basic trigonometry using the line’s x, y, and rotation), then rotate coordinates of the whole system to as if it was a flat surface, calculate how it should bounce, then rotate it back and apply the new velocities to the ball.
The next step for me is to thoroughly neaten up the code. I’ve made each line a separate instance and hard coded each in so I really need to separate it up into classes and generalize. Then I need to figure out a way of reducing the number of tests per frame. I don’t really have time to muck around with more complex systems so I think I’ll just use a basic grid and test for collisions only with objects in each section. Hopefully this’ll allow me to have a lot more lines on the stage without too much lag.

As for Gamer, he’s come up with a character design and made some pretty nifty sprites:

http://www.fileize.com/view/545c455e-776/
(arrow keys)

He wants to turn the walking animation into more of a jog, and make a proper jumping sprite, but so far the I think the character is really neat. These aren’t the final controls btw, just an example file. We’re going to make the character’s head face towards the mouse and, if you’re running the opposite direction to the direction you’re facing, you’ll face backwards.

That’s all for today!