Progress Made!

sj on 2006/03/31 06:57 of sj

After a few false starts I finally got something working around about day three. The kind of game I decided to make was a top-down scrolling shooter. I was a bit dubious about this as I have tried this style for other games, and pygame just seems to go awfully slow with it. However once I got a tiled background and could place objects over the top I could see the game was running fine. Hooray!

As for the setting - it sounds a bit generic, but i think it works well - you are zooming around inside a giant space vehicle, which is divided up into different floors, or decks. There is the fire deck, the steam deck and the main deck. All the action takes place on the main deck, with different machines venting power up from the steam deck. Normally this works fine, but as Murphey's Law will have it, things go wrong. A malfunction in the machines causes some of the normally happy worker drones to turn mad, acting violently towards some of the more vital parts of the ship's mechanisms. First of all, the ventilation system goes kaput: so as steam is draws into the main deck, it's trapped and starts building up the pressure - cooking everything inside. All you can do to prevent this is manually vent the deck from dedicated control points.

Also, drones are continually produced up on deck and will fire on anything that still functions. Dangerous! Now, while these droid producing factories are active, they channel resources away from the main doors so travel between rooms is impossible.

So to get out of the room you are stuck in you need to take out the bad guys, get to the machine that makes them and destroy it. Sounds easy? Well, once the machine is destroyed an open shaft to the steam deck continually pumps the room full of scalding steam. Now, there are a few of these factories in each room, so soon steam is billowing in and you must run back to the vent system to manually release the pressure to survive.

That's basically it. Running from room to room shooting everything that is against you, while trying to survive against the hazards.

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Comments

pekuja on 2006/03/31 10:39:

Wow, you've got all sorts of things there to look out for. Sounds like it's going to be very challenging. I like that. :-)