Working copy of the game, have one of my friends here playing it with me.. The merging of the planets now goes to an appropriate position, but generally happens too fast so you just get a few of them in one point.. Momentum is not conserved yet either but it still seems to look ok.

Each ship can shoot 5 sets of bullets (each has its own  “trail”, as you can see in the picture above, which lets you see it curve etc..), whenever the bullets hit the edge of the map, another player, or a planet, they let you shoot again. Bullets now curve appropriately based on the gravitational pull of the planets. I removed the background because not only does it look more minimalistic without it, but it also looks better without it.

Next step is to provide a “stability” factor for the planets, where they will split into several planets if its not stable enough, the stability can be decreased by shooting the planets. This should help offset the fact that all the planets just merge together, I’d also like to get some particles flying round the screen that nothing, just to give the feel of the scales when the screen zooms out.

Since i’m making pretty good time with such a simple idea, I will also be trying to get an AI done for this.. although the only previous experience i’ve had with programming an AI was for “hunt the wumpus” (check wikipedia).. so no guarentees of its awesomeness.

Once all thats done i’ll be making some config file loader (like an ini file) for changing settings, because currently the only way toproperly customise it all is through the source code.

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 19th, 2008 at 5:25 pm and is filed under LD11 - Minimalist. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.