… just one more level

I had been anticipating VVVVVV ever since I saw the trailer on TIGSource, so naturally I was excited when it was finally released some two weeks ago. Busy me had no time to play it until a few days ago, though.

I got the demo, played it through、 and loved it. So I bought the full game.

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Hacksim has been silently put on hiatus while Akselii and I gather our senses and finish whatever the both of us are busy with at the moment. For me, that is a second round of addiction to Dwarf Fortress.

An early alpha of another visualiser for Dwarf Fortress was released not too long ago. It’s called Stonesense, and it is isometric (and therefore lush).

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This is the first screenshot I have to show of the hacksim game thing; massively work in progress, this shows that while the game is heavily command-line based, there will at the very least be a fancy globe for traceroute etc.

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Work has commenced (barely) on a new project, a game from scratch by Akselii and I – temporarily dubbed hacksim. Guess what genre it is.

It should become the least unrealistic hacking simulation around, which isn’t saying much. We were a bit torn on whether to make the game as realistic as possible. In the end, we decided to tone down the realism a bit (still way above the other games out there) in favour of accessibility.

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Finally getting somewhere. Damage works, throwing works (but needs to be balanced), walls need a little fiddling with (there’s still only one wall, for starters). The UI is nothing like I want it to, but that’ll have to wait.

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The next project of mine has already begun. It is a simple snowball fight; you pick snow up with the right mouse button, and throw it with the left mouse button. Hit the opponent, but keep moving so as to avoid being hit yourself. There is even a wall there.

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This is usually what keeps me from completing projects; some feature being uncontrollably more to manage than what I first thought it would be. In this case, polygon collision detection. I think two or three of my games have been abandoned simply due to this, and I now add another to the list. It even had a working scripting system, sigh.

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No images from the game today. I’ve been stuck with a bit of the engine functions, mainly loading textures. Using 1600×1200 24-bit PNGs (for a 1024×768 background, even) turned out to be a bad idea, but even resizing them to 1024×768 leaves loading times of at least a few seconds. This is in no way acceptable when transitioning from one part of the map to the next, so I have to load the images when the game starts instead – to keep some sort of flow in the gameplay.

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Scripting. Not the plot-writing kind, mind you. It is essential to have some sort of scripting engine if you’re not relying on procedurally generated content – and it would take too much to write a procedurally generated interesting exploration game.

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I have an idea for a game. I have written/drawn a plot for said game. I have even gone so far as to begin coding this game.

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