Game Development Status 11/4/09

I've been thinking about priorities lately. There are several things I want to work on for the game and limited time in which to do the work. By my own plan I am supposed to be prototyping the UI, the game system, and parts of the AI, pretty much in that order. I have spent time lately on supporting infrastructure tasks such as familiarization with MVVM and AvalonDock. While I ought to be willing to throw the prototype away and start over fresh when I get the final approval to proceed, I hate to waste the work. The questions I have are whether I should just throw some code together for the prototype or whether I should complete my familiarization with MVVM and AvalonDock so I can proceed using TDD and use the prototype as the basis for the final game.

I may not even have approval to write a game for PIC-Guam. I don't have an agreement yet with Chris.

One thing I did decide recently is that I will write this game regardless of whether I have Chris' appproval to do so. I believe I can do so as a hobby project even if I don't have a contract. I want to write a game. PIC-Guam should translate extremely well to the PC, and its much of its AI and UI will be applicable to many different game systems. Even if I cannot sell a PC PIC-Guam game, I should be able to rework the exec, AI, and UI to support other games in the future.

I think the most important thing to do is write the damn thing.

Which part should I write first? Tricky...

"If I Had Another Hammer..."

Eric Dornenburg wrote a good article on counter-arguments against using technology (an ESB in this case) just because it's cool.

If all you have is an RDD or MMD (Management Mandated Development) hammer, everything looks like a nail.

I Beat Orbital Decay on "Hard"

I've been playing flash games on Kongregate to pass the time. One of my recent favorites is a game called Orbital Decay. It's a sidescroller in which you play the part of a lost battleship of some sort. The ship has a main gun under player control, 4 fighter bays, a dozen-odd hardpoints for laser/frag/rocket turrets, and a built in repair capability. All of these are upgradeable using resource units (RU) gained by destroying enemy ships. The game is episodic in nature. You start off with a damaged ship: only one fighter bay is working and all other hardpoints are empty. There are easy, medium and hard modes of play, and you can add unlimited RUs by typing in the cheat code "cash". Using cheat codes voids the game's high score on Kongregate for purposes of earning badges.

I just won the game on Hard without cheats. Not easy. I based the early levels on OSquared's upgrades reposted 27 Apr 09 by ddrumdrummer69. Sold the fighter bay and upgraded the main gun with the initial points, then alternated Main Gun damage and various repair drone upgrades per OSquared. Later I bought one laser turret midships and one frag turret 4th hardpoint back from front, and upgraded these to max, mixed in with more upgrades for repair drones. After that I filled all the other hardpoints with rocket turrets, and then upgraded those once I had filled all the hardpoints. On the final screen, I sold off everything but the frag turret and used the points to max drone repair (last, 500 increment was the only remaining upgrade at that point) and add 4 fighter bays with 10 fighters and first step dam/ROF upgrades. As I killed the first two ships and attendant fighers, I upgraded the bays to 12 fighters and then fighter HP as RU accumluated. After that it was a matter of killing the boss ship...the fighters are necessary in order to distract the boss ship and its fighters. There were a couple of places where it was necessary to re-run the level a few times in order to play with the weapons mix. I had to re-run the final level 5-6 times to fine tune the fighter upgrades, plus the boss ship would ignore my fighter respawns if it killed all my fighters.

One other bit of advice is to give priority of fire to mines on any level that includes them; they damage your ship too much if permitted to do so.

It's a good game. It's every bit as entertaining to me as the old coin-op games such as Choplifter or Defender. This is another great example of the proliferation of small(er) games on websites these days.