| Friday, September 19, 2008 |
  Weekly Gyruss Clone Update | 
Posted - 9/19/2008 11:43:48 PM | 
Click here to play.
Another week gone by, and a few updates have been made. Nothing too earth-shaking this time, just a graphic update: A rotating background. This was entirely too difficult to implement, or I was vastly over-thinking the problem. Probably the latter.
Because I am blitting several bitmaps together to draw the screen I needed to come up with a method to get the bitmap which comprises the background to rotate. In this instance, a simple background.rotation++ wouldn't work; I needed to do a little matrix math to rotate the actual bitmap data, rather than the bitmap which contained the bitmap data. And that caused its own issues; namely, that the original bitmap - which was simply a square with some Perlin noise applied - had subsequently been redrawn around polar coordinates, and then twisted, and expanded so that the resulting circle was as large as the diagonal of the original square, rather than the sides. And somewhere in there the origin point for the bitmap data became, well... not the center of the circle.
Obviously, I eventually got everything figured out.
But not before dealing with a couple of hours of this:
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| Monday, September 15, 2008 |
| More Spiral-ey Things | |
Posted - 9/15/2008 11:23:31 AM | 
I just posted an update to the Gyruss clone. It includes one cosmetic change - the color palette of the background - and some experiments around how power-ups will work.
On the inside, I change how the shots move, to give them the ability to track around the center when fired at an angle. This also opened the possibility that enemies will be able to do the same thing.
I also spent a little while creating new graphics for the player ship, but almost immediately gave up in frustration, for two reasons: I am not a skilled artist, and I don't yet know what I want the overall theme of the game to be. And I felt depressed that it took me an hour and a half to come up with a BAD 48px x 24px sprite.
I have not yet done much work with optimizing the performance of the game. I will probably do something like this technique from 8-bit Rocket. Or even exactly like that. I just know that, when there are a couple of hundred shots floating around, things start to look kind of choppy.
There are a few more things I am going to work on before I add sound and significant graphics improvements:
- power-ups
- different enemy power, toughness, formation
- bosses
- indestructible objects
- start- and end- game screens
- etc...
Huh. Creating a simple game takes a long time at an hour of development time a week.
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