First demo level and (small) gameplay movie!

Here is a picture showing a view of the first demo level in the editor. I threw it together in a couple hours.

















Here is a Video of first level. This level is actually pretty hard. Take a look at some preliminary gameplay.

Initial images from my latest project.

about latest game

I just started on a new project. I set aside 4 hours to make a super simple game. The idea was to have a one-button game. I would have a wheel that would roll around. There would be a rocket attached to the wheel that would release a burst of energy when you pused the space bar. The idea was that by simply timing your jumps with the rotation of the wheel you could move around. The problem is durring play testing the game just wasn't fun. Simple tasks were too hard, and the wheel would get spinning too fast and make it almost impossible to really time things correctly. I could reduce the friction making the wheel turn slower, but then you would often be waiting too long for the wheel to come back around to direct your next jump; Also it made the physics look akward. If I wasn't using a physics engine, you could probably do a better job of making it fun by making it more like a puzzle game, but it just wasn't working out.

controls

I decided to start over-complicating things right off the bat by adding directional "jumping" by using the space bar, to jump towards the mouse. This is an intuitive way to move around and using the mouse give you very fine-grained contol over your direction. To make things interesting, I disable jumping again until you collide with something. This allows you to still chain jumps, but keeps you from doing too much in-air maneuvering.
By holding down the spacebar you will see an arrow pointing towards your mouse, filling up indicating how much power you have stored up. Upon releasing the space bar you will be hurled forth!




























gameplay

You can beat levels by ether completing it in a certain ammount of time, or a minimal ammount of jumps. Either way will win the level, but you will have to earn a bronze in either one to progress. You will also be rewarded for completing levels in both ways and by getting gold medals for exceptional efforts. There will be many natural obsticals to overcome as well as bad guys to avoid. As the game progresses you will get powerups to handle these situations including lazer-guns and rocket launchers.

Sound Woes

Sound problems in TGB (Torque Game Builder).

I'm using GarageGames TGB engine because it is amazingly fast to get something up and running quickly. It's easy to find some roadblocks along the way though when using the 'C'-like scripting engine "torque script". Luckily it ships with the source so you can change the shortcomings as they arise.

TGB uses openAL for sound. My latest problem is that they didn't expose alot of the functions that are available with openAL to the scripting engine. For instance, there is no function to change the sound pitch, modulation, or reference a point in time for a sound. I want to make the engine sound like it's working harder as you drive it. Something you would immediately notice if it wasn't done right. I figured I could do this two ways:

a) change the pitch of a sound as the car goes faster.
b) use a long sound bite of the car shifting through the gears, and referencing a point in the sound clip relative to the current speed of the car.

Option B is probably the most realistic, and simple way to accomplish the basic car sound. The problem is that getting torque script to use this functionality in openAL means I will have to do some engine hacking. This isn't a terrible problem, but getting MsDev up and running and working out all the dependancy problems is a bear. I've done it a few times now and am avoiding it. I'll probably move onto some of the more pressing gameplay issues before coming back to this sound. Currently I am just using a crappy engine loop and stopping it once I let off the gas.

waypoint Arrow for off screen destinations

I created a "streachy arrow" to point to the next waypoint so the driver can find his way around a foreign place to his destination. Took some fenagling, and the usual trig + vector math, but nothing to harry. I used some functions from my other game in development "Red Shift" to help this along. It's nice to borrow from your other projects.. makes things go faster sometimes.



example of the angle function:

function calculateAngle(%source,%target)
{
// get the desired angle required to point at the target
%vec = t2dVectorSub(%source, %target);

%angle = -mRadToDeg(mATan(getWord(%vec,0),getWord(%vec,1))); return %angle;
}

setting the position, and vector length etc, for the destination vector.

function updateDestinationArrow(){
%tmp = $pCar.getPosition();

%tmp1 = $waypoint[$currentTarget.parkOrder+1].getPosition();
%angleVector=calculateAngle(%tmp,%tmp1);
%angleAdd=t2dVectorDistance(%tmp1,%tmp);
%angleAdd*=2; //double the lengh since I'm using a half image

$destinationArrow.setRotation(%angleVector-90);
$destinationArrow.setWidth(%angleAdd);
$destinationArrow.setPosition($pCar.getPosition());
}

Waypoint System

I have a waypoint system set up for creating the levels objectives. Currently you can just copy and existing waypoint, and move it somewhere.
Give it an angle to represent the direction that you want the player to park, the order it should be processed in relation to the other waypoints, and how long the player has to reach it.

zoom example

Here is a picture of the car driving faster. The camera is pulled back so you can see further, hopefully giving you more advanced notice of objects that you might be barreling towards.

new art, zoom

I've been dinking away at the game with my limited art skills. Building a block system for the editor. Basically I have a basic block with grass on it, and I'm creating different surfaces and buildigs to put on the blocks.

I added a zoom, that pulls the camera back a bit as you drive faster, and zooms in more for precision parking. Starting to look ok. Adding shadows to the objects helps make the objects fit in the world better. Wow, it always surprises me how long it takes to build art resources for games.