Monday, March 2, 2009

The Beginning

I've now successfully completed my prototype of my first game, tentatively titled "Punk Rock Saved My Life". The prototype is essentially the first room in the game, and it took me about a month of coding in my spare time. It includes a large front desk with two computers on it, two robots who move and can shock the player, and a completely working rhythmic/music system. I don't know if anyone else will ever read this post, I'm writing it mostly as a time capsule, so that I can look back on where I started from when the game is finished. Here is a list of what is in the game right now and how I hope to improve it:

- in the prototype, all three attacks for the first level are immediately available to the player, so that I could test out the implementation, but when the game is running properly, the player will start with just one and unlock the other attacks as the level goes on
- I'd like to have the background music change at different points throughout the level, at least during boss fights; listening to the same repeating two or four bar chord progressions might get annoying through levels that could take 15-20 minutes to play through
- I'm hoping to improve on the robot AI; at the moment the robots just chase you in circles, and have no way of navigating around obstacles; I'm fine with the way the AI chases the player, at least for the basic security bots, but I'd like it to be able to navigate obstacles to give a more consistent challenge
- collision detection is requiring a lot of work to get running properly; right now I have to check collision for each individual object, and many of them require special routines in order to keep the player from getting hung up on them or, in the case of larger sprites, getting stuck inside them entirely
- there are no puzzles of any sort; right now clean guitar serves no purpose, except that it makes the sound dynamics more interesting; all distorted guitar riffs operate in exactly the same way; there's nothing that tests the player's ability to enter pieces of riffs in sequence, as most of the puzzles and some of the boss fights will do, and that's one of the major programming tasks that I've got left
- there's no dialogue; I need to finish writing it, then record it, then I need to figure out and/or make a method to ensure that animations line up with the dialogue properly; possibly get music lining up with dialogue too
- I've determined that I want to use some of the songs I've already written in the game, as a sort of soundtrack, but I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to do that: menu music, credit music, and cut scene music are all viable options at the moment. That would give me room for about five songs
- the code needs to be cleaned up so that I can access things more easily and put less strain on the system resources; currently the vast majority of the code is in one main file, I may try to split this up if it proves unwieldy, as it almost certainly will

EDIT: I'm targetting an end-of-year release for the game. I also want that written in here for posterity.

No comments:

Post a Comment