I'm alive. Hooray.
There are three reasons for the lack of posts as of late. The first cause is that, the search for employment has heated up and demanded more of my time, which is a good thing. The second reason is that I had proceeded far enough with the engine that I felt that I needed to step back and decide what sort of game I was intending to create. This resulted in a lot of game design brainstorming that, while productive, did not make for good video. The third reason is 3D Dot Game Heroes, which was completely legitimate research into developing retro-style games. Yes.
The bosses in Beat Hazard, with their random assortment of turrets, reminded me a bit of the super procedural bosses in Warning Forever. This rekindled an idea I had for making a game with this engine, namely, the generation of random side-scroller bosses.
The first type of boss I could imagined creating a simple set of, interchangeable powers and behaviors for was a character similar to our hero. A guy with a set of attachable weapons and armor that do various things. I thought back to the endless supply of Robot Masters from the Mega Man games and came up with the next phase in this process.
Random boss guys should drop their random boss weapons when defeated. This made the immediate mental connection with my recent experience playing Borderlands and Torchlight. A supply of random boss 'man' characters dropping random weapons could make for a highly amusing 'loot treadmill' scenario.
I won't get into too many further details of the assorted silly game ideas I had, but they were numerous and silly.
But were they fun? To determine that, I began laying out plans to develop some of the basics of the system and prototype it out, starting with a system by which I would randomly generate weapons for our side-scrolling protagonist.
The early phases of that can be seen in this video, where ten or so random weapons are dropped into the inventory.
These weapons have properties that are rolled for on various tables including increasingly rare gun attributes.
The most important may be the type of projectile fired. While the bullets have few differences at this early phase, they do pull from different asset files that can define stats such as damage and velocity, as well as what sub-class of bullet they are actually defined by. This will allow me to do things like having a grenade that respects gravity and bounces without changing the core 'dynamic gun' class at all.
I also added some basic stats on the back-end to define things like hit points and attack power. I also added some basic RPG-Style flying numbers, although they're pretty much all '1's at this point, but the systems are coming together.
There are three reasons for the lack of posts as of late. The first cause is that, the search for employment has heated up and demanded more of my time, which is a good thing. The second reason is that I had proceeded far enough with the engine that I felt that I needed to step back and decide what sort of game I was intending to create. This resulted in a lot of game design brainstorming that, while productive, did not make for good video. The third reason is 3D Dot Game Heroes, which was completely legitimate research into developing retro-style games. Yes.
The bosses in Beat Hazard, with their random assortment of turrets, reminded me a bit of the super procedural bosses in Warning Forever. This rekindled an idea I had for making a game with this engine, namely, the generation of random side-scroller bosses.
The first type of boss I could imagined creating a simple set of, interchangeable powers and behaviors for was a character similar to our hero. A guy with a set of attachable weapons and armor that do various things. I thought back to the endless supply of Robot Masters from the Mega Man games and came up with the next phase in this process.
Random boss guys should drop their random boss weapons when defeated. This made the immediate mental connection with my recent experience playing Borderlands and Torchlight. A supply of random boss 'man' characters dropping random weapons could make for a highly amusing 'loot treadmill' scenario.
I won't get into too many further details of the assorted silly game ideas I had, but they were numerous and silly.
But were they fun? To determine that, I began laying out plans to develop some of the basics of the system and prototype it out, starting with a system by which I would randomly generate weapons for our side-scrolling protagonist.
The early phases of that can be seen in this video, where ten or so random weapons are dropped into the inventory.
These weapons have properties that are rolled for on various tables including increasingly rare gun attributes.
The most important may be the type of projectile fired. While the bullets have few differences at this early phase, they do pull from different asset files that can define stats such as damage and velocity, as well as what sub-class of bullet they are actually defined by. This will allow me to do things like having a grenade that respects gravity and bounces without changing the core 'dynamic gun' class at all.
I also added some basic stats on the back-end to define things like hit points and attack power. I also added some basic RPG-Style flying numbers, although they're pretty much all '1's at this point, but the systems are coming together.
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