Finally we're at the point where we can demonstrate something happening in our game! The first day was spent mostly drawing, and yesterday night was spent building the bare bones of a game. But I've just pushed the code for us to attach parts to our mutant!


"Aargh, 'ee's all bloody lungs!"

A few things came together today. After I added the ability to connect additional parts to your mutant I soon added rescaling of parts. This allows body parts to grow into place, and it also allows lungs to breathe and hearts to beat.

The first grotesequely pulsating monster was this armoured slug thing:



Then I implemented some of the other body parts on the drawing board:



The framerate is lower than I would have expected. Possibly Box2D doesn't like me scaling dozens of shapes every frame, but I haven't investigated further.

Finally I wasted a good hour trying to make the mutant stand more gracefully. In fairness, Honda spent years making ASIMO walk, so I should have expected to fail in an evening. Making the creature walk is going to be an exercise in physics hacks.

Disappointing progress - hours and hours of hacking have been poured into simply getting the physics smooth enough to build a game on, and being able to save and restore monsters' parts and the joints that connect them.

Tomorrow there is the mammoth challenge of making the game work, adding all the upgrades, fighting, destruction, collection of mutagen, camera panning and zooming and so on, and to be honest it probably won't happen to the point that it's enjoyable to play. Terribly disappointing when I've poured so much time into getting the game this far. This was really a project for two people, but superjoe hasn't been motivated to contribute much this week.

Oh, well. Have a couple of screenshots.

It's the final day - corners are being cut, coffee is being brewed, features are dropping, bugs are creeping... when will it all end?

In the data/saves/ directory of Monster Mechanics, you'll find screenshots (and JSON dumps) of all the monsters you've created.

I'd be interested in seeing whether anyone's come up with anything interesting - for example, any monsters that have grown to a reasonably large size without turning themselves inside-out. Or do you have any other interesting pictures in there?

In this screenshot I'm getting in there with some vicious butt-spikes: