So, I decided a while back that I would join the warmup weekend.

It’s much longer than a weekend, and that makes me happy.

My game is a shmup. I’ve been working on one, but I need a cleaner code base to work from. The one I had is a mess of excess inheritance and unimplemented methods.

Here’s the premise: You fly a little space ship and shoot bad guys. On different intervals (in kill count) enemies either give off a bigger explosion, drop a score/weapon/extra life item, or give off a bigger explosion and drop three items.

The levels are assembled randomly from hand-made parts and have randomly chosen bosses from about a dozen hand-scripted bosses.

The idea is this: Motivate the player with scheduled reward to make the game more compelling.

The idea comes from the idea that games work partly by rewarding the player. Hence, I figure that I can make a compelling game simply by deliberately rewarding the player.

The Wikipedia article about behaviorism can give those who are curious a better idea of how this is supposed to work.

Peace, love, and manipulation,

– Henry

Edit: While I’m at it, here’s the article about behavior modification, which is also relevant