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| Tuesday, February 27, 2007 |
  More ruffians! | 
Posted - 2/27/2007 12:22:29 AM | Midterms
My midterms today was exceedingly well, or so I believe. German was a breeze, and CS was mighty nice, sans a certain inductive proof. I won't say more until I have definite results. 
More foes!
Pretty much the last 'feature' to add to the game are some more (interesting) enemies. I've 'uncut' a few items from my previous post just for the sake of having some particularly cool enemies in the game.
The plan is to have each enemy receive a difficulty rating, enabling the game to get progressively harder linearly, rather than just spewing out enemies at random. Currently the game just defines difficulty as the sheer number of cells, not each's prowess.
With that, I give you the the Freezer Cell, the Stalker, and the Mecha Cell.
(Creating ice trails where ever he goes, and absorbing Freeze Bombs to grow larger, it's the Freezer Cell! Let's not forget the Freeze Bomb its carrying..)
(Somesort of lightning-quick cell capable of near-invisibility and able to move through walls with ease. Watch out!)
(Cooler image pending)
(Deflecting machinegun rounds?! Uh oh! Not to mention the missile-firing capabilities!)
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| Saturday, February 24, 2007 |
| The cutting room floor | |
Posted - 2/24/2007 10:49:05 PM | Reading Week
And so comes the end of Reading Week. I wasn't as productive as I had wanted to be this week, but at least I got some work done. I have two midterms on Monday (German and CS), so I'm confident that Sunday will be something reasonably hellish.
Membrane Massacre
I embarked on the mission to write Membrane Massacre (originally named "Gone Micro") in November of 2006. It is now nearing the end of February 2007, and MM remains incomplete. In the last three months of development Membrane Massacre has evolved far past the game that I released back near the end of November. The game actually has a polished feel to it. It's by no means ideally polished, and I'm realizing that it won't be.
3.5 months is enough. Looking back at it now, it seems like I've wasted so much time. I find it hard to believe that what I have right now took me nearly a third of a year to create -- my progress has been pretty sluggish since December.
That's why I've decided that rather than let MM continue development until what could easily be the 6-month mark, I'm going to cut out a handful of content and features in order to get the game out the door. I'm extremely pleased with the game that I've created, and its public feedback thus far, so I have no doubt this next iteration will be even better.
To Be Cut
- Enemy A* pathfinding AI
- Enemy projectile 'leading' (ie. having foes fire at where you are going to be, rather than where you are)
- Enemy weapon resistances (eg. reflecting laser beams, ricocheting bullets)
- Enemy evolution (offspring that are split get stronger)
- Sub-Bosses (the Mecha Cell, the Freezer Cell, the Mother Cell)
- Explosion shrapnel (to get wedged into cell membranes and walls)
- More level generation algorithms
- 'Killer Weapons' (special weapons of large-scale destruction, per-ship)
- Multiple ships (and a selection screen/system to go with it)
- Victory Reports (at the end of each level; x enemies killed, etc)
- Trophies / Trophy Room (secret prizes for doing certain things, like beating the game with only the Blaster, not hitting any walls, etc)
- Highscores (for Story and Survival modes)
- Boosters (let player fly super-fast and tear through walls/enemies)
- A bunch of new regular enemies
- Etc. (gah, there's ~8 more items on my list
 )
Anyways, you get the idea. I have so many great ideas that, if implemented, would definitely kick the game up several more notches. However, Membrane Massacre was only intended to be a quick, 2-week adventure. I never dreamed that it would still be in development by the end of the next year, nor would I have had wanted it to. It's time to wrap things up and get the game finished and out the door. This doesn't mean that I'm tired of it and plan on rush-jobbing the rest of the game. I intentionally cut features in such a manner that the remainder of my motivation will be used to commit myself 100% to the remaining items left to implement. Perhaps the other factor for me wanting to release is to let everyone get a look at what I've been toiling over for these months.
Next!
I'm still not completely decided on my next project, but plenty of solid ideas are floating around between me and Draffurd. I want it to be one that reaches a near-commercial state. I'm going to polish the heck out of it, write clean code, and see it to completion. I've gotten a lot better on the first and last item as of late. Just need to trim the code a little! Hurr!
Open Source
Is there anyone with any preference about MM being open/closed source? The code is an absolute mess, but it matters not there's actually folks that think they'd get something out of it.
Hurr, good night!
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| Wednesday, February 21, 2007 |
| Scripting our way to a better tomorrow. | |
Posted - 2/21/2007 12:31:12 AM | Topnote: I know that I really hate it when developers write really dry jargon-infused entries, and I like to think that I've been pretty good about. I must warn you however, this is one of them.
Today mainly saw development work on my game-oriented scripting language, GameScribe. This is mainly because after a nice lengthy Computer Science assignment in Scheme, my mind refused to go back to Membrane Massacre. Better name still pending.
Feature-wise, I implemented both single-line and multi-line comments, the latter supporting nesting. Normal Scheme (which the language is modeled after) only supports single-line comments (via ;'s), but I'm a fellow who likes his multi-line comments. Here's what a sample script looks like with them:
!...
.. Program: First GameScribe script ever.
.. Author: Stephen Whitmore
.. Purpose: To show (hopefully!) that the GameScribe interpreter works :)
!. Aaaah! Nested! .!
...!
(define a (+ 9 10))
(define b a)
(define say_hello "Hello world!")
(print a ", " b)
(print (+ a b))
(print (<= (pow a 5) (* 2 b))) ;; This line isn't confusing. At all!
(print "This concludes the first ever GameScribe script. (" say_hello ")")
(print)
;; Whew, all done!
Nothing that fancy. I'm sure "!." and ".!" look weird as comment header/footers, so I'm open to ideas.
Additionally, several nastier bugs were cleaned up. One of which is that I was sillily (word?) forgetting to recursively identify identifiers (read: unknown 'token' in the script) recursively, meaning if I had "(define a 12)" and "(define b a)" and wrote "(print b)" it would spit out "$a", which is the notation for some unknown identifier. With that, it seems that running scripts from disk works just fine now.
The other burden was getting some in-source documenting done. My last clean-up session was making the interpreter object-oriented, and today's fun was no less exciting. As a result though, I've refamiliarized myself with the code again, and fixed some inconsistancies.
Next on the list is user-defined functions, and proper variable scope. I've decided not to implement functions like Scheme does (as lists, technically), or even have true lambdas. Functionality > complexity for this scripting language.
Despite the dry tone of this entry, I'm actually really excited about GameScribe. (I blame the tiredness!) Writing your own programming language is a really fun exercise that I recommend to anyone willing to give it a shot. I think just about every programmer who is here has wanted to make their own language their way. I urge you to do so -- it's certainly worth it!
| |
| Wednesday, February 14, 2007 |
| Hello GD.NET world! | |
Posted - 2/14/2007 12:10:07 AM | Oh phew, it's good to see GD.NET back online. I'm sure Ravuya is particularly happy because it means I'll stop pestering him for periodic status reports on the site's status.
Anyways, this developer has been doing what he does best: developing! Membrane Massacre is moving forward steadily once again, but whilst managing my schoolwork the best I can. Might as well get the best out of both worlds. That, and I just can't live without working on games!
The additions thus far to MM have been mainly of the visual flavour, which luckily caters just perfectly to screenshots. In particular:
- Dynamic terrain 'drop-shadows' - The terrain now casts a nice shadow effect onto the background, which adds a nice sense of depth. I really wanted to have it transparent, but the extra alpha calculations murdered the game's speed. Still, a nice touch.
- 'Light flashes' - A visual effect I am now extremely fond of. A 'light flash' is really just a set of concentric additive-blended circles that expand and fade given certain parameters. The implications, however, make for some huge leaps in visual presentation for the game. In particular, the Laser has never looked better. (This is also set as an option, since blending is a little CPU intensive)
- Bubbles! - The jury is still out on whether this will be included in the final game or not. Bubbles are created from explosions, cell destruction, or cell splitting, and each follow buoyancy laws and react to terrain. If a bubble hits the terrain too hard (or has been active for too long) it pops into smaller bubbles, making for a cool recursive effect. It's particularly neat when you're hunting some cells and see bubbles suddenly rise up from somewhere below you. "Uh oh, there's some dividing going on down there!". Let me know if you like it.
- Final boss now explodes (and thus is tossed around) upon his defeat. Looks significantly cooler than the previous death sequence. If you reply MM for anything, at least do it to see El Mucho Membrano explode.
- Some bug fixes, of course.
Now to mercilessly throw screenshots at you! Har har!
It also came to my attention that MM has gotten some publicity under "Membrane Madness", since I suppose to the casual observer 'massacre' and 'madness' are alike. Two copyrights for the price of one! ..Right?
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"Good night, Monster Land."
"Good night, brave warrior."
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