Today was my first real day off in a while, so I decided to work on Angels 20, the first time in about 2 weeks.
Anyways, today was very productive, and I'm running out of things to do with the game. Today I added little people that run around the map(more on this later), I added another weapon, a little swarmer rocket, and I fixed a crash bug that I thought occurred randomly, but didn't.
Thing #1: Little People
This was a feature that has been in the works for a long time, but Mark and I weren't sure if it would fit into the game well, but today I made it work, and I can say with utmost certainty, that the little people are here to stay. The little people are just little animated objects that can be set to one of four types of "pedestrian": and idle person, and running person, a waving person, and POW person(a mix of the 3). The "pedestrians" are arranged into a resource pool of objects, so that any in game action can result in pedestrians getting spawned somewhere. Mark and I are planning on having people inside the villages of the game, having panicked runners flee from destroyed buildings and flak sites, and have prisoners run away from their prisons when guard towers are destroyed. It looks pretty cool in motion, having all these little people running around when you fly over, but the effect is sort of lost in the screens:
Thing #2: The New Weapon
Mark has been complaining about how horribly overpowered the rockets were in the game, so I made a smaller, shorter ranged, crazy rocket!!! This is where it gets confusing though: the new rockets are now the old rockets, and the old rockets are now called the HyperShanker Armor-piercing Rockets!! Anyways, the new rockets are crazy ones that move randomly, and are meant to be fired in salvos to carpet an area with ordinance, as in the screen below:
Thing #3: Wierd Crash
Every once and a while, the game would crash when you tried to restart a level. I thought this was a completely random thing, because there was no real pattern to the crashes, until today, when I found the trigger. As it turns out, the game would only crash if you fired a weapon that could destroy a tile, and hit restart before it blew up. When the player hits restart, the projectiles are all "killed", and moved off the map, when you don't let something hit a target, it retains it's type of ordinacne after it is "killed" during restart, and ends up trying to blow up the tile under it, which in this case didn't exist, causing a crash. I have no idea how I made the connection between all that stuff happening at once, but it just hit me and I rolled with it[grin].
Anyways, Mark the artist went away this week on vacation, and without his annoying nagging keeping on track, I began to search for other projects to try out. I settled on making a gravity simulator, and make one I did. My friend and I sat down and in 1 hour had a simulation running that could take an object, and have its position be affected by multiple planetoids of varying size and mass. Anyways, it was a fun diversion, and here's a screen!!
Well, its late now, so I will talk to you guys later!!
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Angels 20 Feature WorkList
-An Actual Front-End Menu
-A Map of the Level on the HUD
-Good MIG AI
-Destructable Tiles
-A checklist of enemies on the level
-Repair Trucks that actually have to stop to repair stuff
-Ground Vehicles that can shoot at you
-More weapons (ie. Napalm, Cluster Bombs, etc)
-Fully Automatic Gun
-Forward Supply Bases
-More mission parameters (ie. timelimits , targets , etc)
-Random HUD Stuff
-Expanded Tileset
-Improved Level Editor
-Gameplay balancing and tweaking
-New Mission Types
(Almost Done!!!!)
