little things

[egypturnash]

Today was a pretty long day, that felt longer. I've been having trouble getting up and getting out to work at the Museum - the combination of altering my hormonal dosage* with a week in sunny Seattle, three hours ahead of Boston, which has been consistently grey and cloudy since we returned, seems to have me slow to wake up and slow to get moving. And the things I'm trying to fix at work right now are recalcitrant, so I don't get as much sense of task-accomplishment as I'd hope. At least I can leave these problems at work instead of taking them home in my head, like I used to when I passionately cared about my job.

When I got home I was hoping to pull out some paths on Absinthe pages, but I only got as far as loading a few up into AI to contemplate before I got sucked into the Internet.

But I managed to finally get myself to do a couple things on the to-do list that's been floating around the computer desk. Order some more titty pills, and type up the contact info from the little pile of business cards people left at the show for info on the deck. After I typed in all the email addresses, I put the cards back into the box I was keeping them in. One ended upside down, and it just made me smile: a tiny little half-height Moo card, from 'Ab3nd', who just describes themselves as a 'Mad Scientist'.

I get given business cards by mad scientists. This makes me feel better.

* Going off of spirolactone because, well, while it may suppress testosterone, it also seems to interfere with my ability to hold part of the image in my head while drawing. THIS IS BAD.

Comments

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

Part of it was fatigue, but a lot of it was avoiding the major restructuring my home project needs to keep going. I need to get on top of that fairly soon because the fifth rapid prototyping session starts next week, and I want to try a non-arena shooter for a change.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

Oooh, yeah, restructuring is a major push away. It's big and no fun.

How much work would a quick and dirty hack be? Something like making the player ALWAYS have a certain velocity added to their 'real' velocity for certain phases of the calculations?

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

I need to at least separate the (relatively) game-independent core from the game-specific portions so I can have more freedom to mess with things.

What I have so far is this:

• build the level as a long, narrow "strip"
• lock the player ship orientation to the x (horizontal) or y (vertical) axis
• give the player ship a velocity bias based on scroll rate
• change camera behavior to fixed-rate scroll along the "long" axis and proportional scroll along the "short" axis
• have player controller constrain the player ship to the visible area
• activate instances as the play area approaches, and deactivate them again when they leave

No one step is "hard", but they do represent some fundamental changes in the way the game works. I think they'll be good for the project over all, since they shake out a lot of assumptions that crept in over time.

[shatterstripes.livejournal.com]

It sounds like you pretty much have it! Hack up some random enemy and terrain spawners that hover a bit above the visible area and you'd have a generative shmup with no more work.

Throwaway thought: How much more work would it be to do this extension for arbitrary scroll directions? X or Y scrolling are traditional, with the occasional bit of 'x scrolling with places where the screen drifts up or down a bit' - but why not try diagonal scrolling? Or any arbitrary scroll direction, for that matter?

You could do a version of that Raizing race-shmup that actually had a curvy track, for instance. Put 'scroll direction' tags along the level layout and maybe put some smoothing on scroll direction changes...

[ultraken.livejournal.com]

That would definitely be interesting, and not unprecedented: SNK's Vanguard had some diagonal-scrolling parts.

Maybe it could be done with a "camera path" or something.