Monthly Archive for October, 2006

Words: Forest, Moon landing

Description: The first game made as the rules intended. On this game I was inspired rather quickly, and my first plan was to make something about driving a logging-truck on the moon. I found some tutorials on inverse kinematics and toyed around with them, and after looking around a bit I came across the rope physics example. The rope uses a combination of techniques, and handles the segments as a series of particles with constraints. Add some inertia and gravity to that mix and you have a very pleasant behaving rope. This rope was too good of a thing to pass up so I decided that you’d fly around in a saucer picking trees up instead. The first version I did had the saucer flying over a flat landscape, and the challenge was more to keep the saucer from crashing than anything else. That wasn’t really fun enough, so I experimented with wrapping the gameplay around a sphere instead. It did get more interesting, but was in essence the same game with a bit of gloss on the top. But once i made the controls a bit more forgiving and added in the possibility to throw trees I found some solid gameplay.

What went right: I find the game very visually pleasing, add a few more types of trees and a better background and it will look splendid. I really think the gameplay is there, however I think it’d be better suited for mouse control than keyboard. This would remove even more focus from controlling the ship allowing the player focus on the actual game.

What went wrong: It has absolutely horrible code. The ship isn’t really moving around the planet, it’s just rotated in to make it seem that way. This makes the physics behave a bit weird. As an example, it’s impossible to throw a tree into orbit. It will always fall onto the moon, as the gravity really is a linear gravity wrapped around a sphere. If I’d want to make something more of this game I’d have to redo it from scratch. This fact made it very hard to change things as the game went along, adding in mouse control would require a complete rewrite.

Conclusion: I like this game, it has potential. The game would benefit from a more management style approach, watering trees to make them grow, keeping vermin away and remove weeds. This would make the whole throwingmoment a bit more exciting as it’s really a bit of a gamble. You’d be able to get much higher scores, but at the same time you’d might not get anything at all. I’m glad I started working on it as early on as I did because that extra time on the end was sorely needed. Without it the game might not have had the throwing, which would have made it a lot less entertaining.