Alright, now I'll write a real dev as opposed to the hardly-classifiable-as-a-cliff-note entry I made yesterday (well, two days ago at this point). As I sit here right now, I'm realizing that ever since I started development of Asplode! I have lost an average of about two hours of sleep every night. This is okay, though, because I'm using that time in such an awesome and enjoyable manner that I should be able to postpone the inevitable coding-all-day-and-night (eight-ten hours of work coding and then a night of game coding) burnout by at least a week. Maybe two. The point, though, is that Asplode! has become this incredibly enjoyable hobby that, I believe, I enjoy more with every successive night of work that I'm able to put into it.

My current development pattern right now is: gameplay feature, visual feature, gameplay feature, visual feature, etc.. By working in this manner I'm able to take a step back from either the graphics or the gameplay with every half an iteration and realize what needs tweaking as I go along. At this point, I'm tweaking the player movement every couple of days along with the various vector model graphics to try and get the game to be as close an approximation to the game I have envisioned in my twisted brainpan. Whenever I implement a feature, whether I'm happy with how it turned out or not (like the way the ship's firing is implemented), I leave it in and move on to something else to see if I can best pinpoint what was most boring/unpleasant, for me, about the feature while as I test the one I'm current implementing. So far, given the limited amount of things I have in the game still, this seems to be working pretty well.

The first thing I did was add a basic border to the playing arena to give a sense of the stage boundaries rather than just having the dimensions of the screen dictate the playing arena:


The simplicity and effectiveness of the simple border graphic ended up adding far more to the game scene than I thought it would; I was planning on having that simply be a placeholder but, I think, I like it enough to keep it in and build the game around that as the border of the game. I like having the border be a set piece of the game screen, as well, as opposed to the scrolling gameplay arena that Geometry Wars: Evolves has. That may change as the game gets more complex but, for Asplode! at least, I will probably stick with the well-defined boundaries. The next thing I implemented is pretty boring to describe but it, basically, acts as the manager for all enemy entities in the game. I call it the EnemyOvermind. Clever, I know. Here's a test of it spawning a bunch of enemies:


I had more, originally, that I was going to write about for this entry but, at this point, I'm realizing that I woke up way too early this morning and actually could use some sleep right now. I'll write about the rest of the weekend's work tomorrow night. Same bat time, same bat channel.

Also, No Country for Old Men was absolutely brilliant and I got 887,895 points in Geometry Wars this morning. Win.