Phew. That was the best 6-consecutive-hour coding session I've had for a long time! [smile]

The main reason for this was to attempt to catch up to where I should be right now. No development was done on Wednesday -- I instead blitzed all of my remaining assignments for the week to clear up the rest of the time 'till the contest ends -- but on Thursday I just got plain lazy and didn't push myself to code. So today was plain mad. Mad!

A few new items to mention:

All five of the weapons that will be appearing in the game are now implemented, complete with all associated sound effects. Although they are all originally taken from findsounds.com and modified to various extents, I'm pretty happy with the level of consistancy I've managed with them. As for the weapons themselves, I'm damn happy with the result that the Laser brings, and the final weapon that I'm sure you'll all enjoy. [grin]

About 1.5-2 hours of this development spree were lost during my plight of changing my recursive sprite/particle manager to an iterative one, after Ravuya shared some stack-related wisdom with me. There were some devious bugs to hunt down, but now the game is running even faster (belting ~8000 particles with no notable problems on my 1.8ghz) and not crashing. At first I thought the reason for the original crashing (which originally led me to the iterative approach instead) was because I had too many particles, but this test led me to believe otherwise. Nuts.




I'm still not sure what the problem was, but now that the iterative method is in and functioning without flaw, I'm not too worried.

Oh yes, let's not forget about the Laser (which looks/feels even cooler in action!):




If you remember my past entry, I was pondering on what I could use for the last weapon for the user to wield. Sir Sapo, LachanL, and Darkcampainger offered some good material, but in the end I caved and implemented: The Freeze Bomb:




This one was tricky to implement, and also looks even cooler in action. Spawning the ~360 projectiles wasn't a big deal, but the system that takes a collision with the map and builds an 'ice root' during runtime looks really really groovy. Each ice root also branches itself off a certain number of times (as do the children they spawn). This weapon will perform this cool effect, and temporarily freeze enemies that are struck by the wave. Worth noting this gun took over an hour to fully implement, hehe. :)


As is also visible, the HUD is now also underway. Icons now exist and have been added for all five weapons (Blaster, MGs, Missiles, Laser, Freeze Bomb), and you can cycle through your weapons with the right mouse button (left mb for firing). The mouse cursor is now an actual crosshair rather than a boring white circle.


All in all, things are really coming together, and I'm extremely happy I decided to take on this project. And of course, big thanks to splattergnome (who still hasn't updated his journal with his progress) for suggesting such a contest to me! I've been having a lot of fun with Gone Micro, and learned some nifty things along the way, too.


Also: splatty informed me that his computer was borked during the first four days of the contest, so we've agreed to allot him an additional four days to make up for his loss. I wouldn't feel right having an entry that had four days over his, so I'll just stop my development on Sunday, and he'll go until Thursday. His game seems to be shaping up well, from what I've heard about it! :)


The battle plan: Saturday will (hopefully) see the full implementation of the enemy bacteria. From the cool cell physics I have planned, to AI/pathfinding, to gooey destruction. And the completion of the HUD. Sunday will be about wrapping up loose ends, and implementing the actual game logic (level selection, gaining new weapons, ammo pickups, bacteria invasion waves, title screen, etc). It's going to be as hard as heck, but I'm confident that I can pull this game off in time.

And I absolutely can't wait to show it to all of you, of course! [smile]