Days 6 and 7

richard on 2007/04/07 13:41 of Fluffy Menace

I spent most of today finishing off the core gameplay stuff (baddies, winning, losing, some FX for picking things up, some more level design). Mostly I was fixing bugs, and I think I've gotten the worst of them (notice I don't even consider saying I got "all" of them ;)

I've uploaded our "final" release, which may be revised overnight by the other guys so there might be another upload tomorrow.

I'm pretty happy with how things turned out. From the README:

On a programming note, this game has some interesting features.

The landscape is generated from a pixmap (see lvl/one*.png or one.xcf
for the complete overview). The pixmap is examined and turned into a series
of cubic bezier curves, rendered partly by OpenGL (the solid bits) and
partly by hand (the line bits).

I also used curves to render the trees and clouds. Run lib/cloud.py and
lib/tree.py for some examples (hitting SPACE to regenerate).

Unfortunately the curved landscape was a pain to work with and there's some
collision glitches (and probably bugs, but nothing I've run into lately).

The game concept is two-fold:

1. hyper-evolution up from a lowly worm to some form more suitable for a
   given environment, and
2. mostly free-form exploration of a large, interesting playing world.

The latter didn't really work in the final submission for PyWeek because time
constraints meant we couldn't construct that large, interesting world. Just
a large one. We had intended to have NPCs to talk to (and bribe with the
money you find in order to locate more items around the world). There's
also clearly scope for more skill-based challenges and so on.

The code and the design discussion is available at:

   http://code.google.com/p/fluffymenace/

There's some dev switches on the command-line:

  -nomusic
  -nointro

And in-game you can hit "d" to pause simulation and hit "s" to step.

UNIMPLEMENTED:
- better level design
- baddies that move
- flying and swimming baddies

KNOWN BUGS:
- none that we're aware of!

IMPROVEMENTS ON THE TABLE
- reduce the number of line segments in landscape
- use ARB_occlusion_query if it's available for flying collision
- background for sky
- we can vary friction on ground to allow sliding but don't use it