A bit more on those mutating firework-shooting aliens
ThibG on 2011/09/14 20:48
of Foreseen Yet Unpredictable Invader
As expected, I have made almost no progress today. I've only worked on the in-game user interface (and on another small surprise you'll discover when playing the game).
But anyway, I'll take a bit more time than usual to go a bit deeper in the details of the way those aliens work.
As I said earlier, you're fighting only one boss at a time. This alien has an initially blank code (all-0 code), of which one random bit is swapped each time you hit the boss. The code runs in a VM specially studied to make the boss more interesting at each mutation, by mapping more ellaborate instructions to opcodes with a higher number of set bits. The same goes with any value, there are no float, only 8-bit integers and rationals, where the most significant part is not any individual bit, but the number of set bits.
This system seems to work quite well, although it would need a bit more tweaking to make the challenge come a bit earlier in the game. Anyway I'm quite happy with the results!
Hopefuly I'll be able to do some menus, intros and things like that tomorrow!
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GruikInc on
2011/09/14 21:13:
This looks like a cool shooter! And the mutating boss can really bring challenge!Good luck to finish it (so that I can test it quickly :p)