This week the accompanied video was recorded on Ben’s machine rather than mine. He was also kind enough to do the editing which is why the video is of vastly superior quality to the usual bare bones rubbish I upload.
The reason for this is that the game is currently in pieces on my machine as I’m integrating a bunch of stuff I had been doing behind the scenes in order to move the game onto its next stage of development. It shouldn’t take more than a couple of weeks now depending on what Art I put in before showing you things again, but what this means is that the above video will be the last time you see a video of the game that looks like this. The next video will be the result of a game changing upgrade… I do mean that in the actual literal sense as I’m changing the game significantly. Not in its essence, just in it’s… well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves because I could still screw it all up.
Last week I talked about the A.I. and the week before that I talked about the entity controller. It was before that I was talking about weapons. You might remember that I mentioned that we were capable of making weapons that launched projectiles that were themselves weapons that launched projectiles. Naturally this has reached its obvious conclusion… No. Not weapons that fire weapons, that fire weapons, that fire weapons. I mean, of course we did that, but the conclusion i am talking about is that the ship has a weapon that launches another ship.
It could be a fighter, but it isn’t. The one you see in the video is a drone that player 2 controls. There is a technical distinction that and a fighter, specifically being that if the drone is destroyed you can just create a new one later, but if the ship is destroyed the drone stops functioning. If you are a design nerd like me that is a very important distinction to make, but I understand if you tuned out a few sentences ago and only start reading again because I dumped a bunch of exclamation marks here *!!!!!!!!*
The drone visually is just a copied and shrunk version of the main ship, but that will change in time. There will also be different drones with different abilities, from simple turrets you can drop, to tiny bombers that drop space cheese on the enemies. Possibly not that since I have no idea what space cheese would accomplish other than seem like a waste of cheese.
The drones can also be A.I. or human controlled so there is no there yet either.
Unfortunately as I mentioned before, I had to leave all the explosions and weapons and fancy things to the side for now as I have other stuff that needs functionificated before we can move forward. Odd that google’s spell check did not have a problem with that word.
Anyway. Not sure what next week’s blog will be about. Ben has been learning to art a bit by making new asteroids in 3D coat, so maybe he can write something up about his heretical and Appallingly sculpting technique of using a mouse instead of a tablet. The end results are fine, so I’ll just grimace and let him get on with it. If you fancy giving us a prod before that. Do so in the usual social media places such as Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube. Bye for now.