Beerman's adventures in voxel-land, part 6 : The best laid plans

Previous Entries : Intro Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5

As mentioned in the last installment, I’ve got about a week and a half left to finish up the voxel game before ROM. Clearly then, this is the perfect time to start working on another game!

A basic spaceship sprite

The homebrew tournament’s been a feature for a couple of years now - basically it’s a high score contest played on games coded by attendees and friends. This year though, the field was looking a bit on the thin side - a few of my regulars didn’t have anything available for one reason or another, and it was down to just myself and Piku of NCOT software.

Not wanting to leave it with just the two games in there, I had a think about what I could build on the voxel code that wouldn’t take much development time, and settled on a sort of hybrid of Flappy Bird and the Star Wars trench run. Pilot your [totallynotanxwinghonest] fighter down an endless, randomly generated trench, with points awarded for distance.

So having got a fair bit done on the shooter on Saturday, I sat down around 6pm Sunday evening to have a play. By 11 it was looking something like this:

Not much of a game there yet, but it does fly really nicely.

Monday night was mostly spent tweaking performance and tidying up a few rendering issues, then Tuesday’s job was making a start on the collision detection.

So far, it just flags a collision if your ship’s centre point is inside of a non-empty chunk - if I don’t want the game to be either stupidly easy or horrifically unfair I probably need to make that a bit more accurate, which means I need to check if any of the ship’s blocks intersect with any blocks in the surrounding chunks. This may involve maths!