Games

Sheep Snaggers 2 continues the fast-paced arcade action of Sheep Snaggers, this time in the side-scrolling style of Defender.

Coming soon...

Had another little play around with SS2 last night. Got my sheep going "baa" now, which adds a little bit of ambience.
Just playing random baas though, it's not obvious that it's actually the sheep doing it and not just background noise, so I added a little something to highlight that.
Give the little buggers a whole lot of personality, I reckon - I might just have to expand this approach to more of my sound effects :D

SS2's starting to come together a bit now. Still doesn't have that classic Defender twitch feel going on, but the basic groundwork's in place now. Just need to make it fun...

Spent a bit of time at the weekend gutting the mode switching code, cos the appalling half-arsed state machine I had in there really wasn't up to scratch.
Swapped it out for a scene-based system that's much easier to work with, then used that as the basis of a level switching system that seems to be working out OK.

+++ SS2OB:ENEMY01 +++

Starsheep Command Briefing Document

Know Your Enemy : A Guide to Sheep-Snagger forces

Starsheep Command have identified the following craft deployed in Sheep Snagger invasion attempts. Study them carefully.

I've been stuck for months now on Sheep Snaggers 2, because I just couldn't seem to get the weapons right. Everything I tried either looked crap, worked really badly, or usually both.

Think I've finally got something I can be happy with now though :)

Spent the weekend mucking around with Flash - specifically, the rather nifty Flixel game library.
So to test it out I knocked together a fun little game that goes by the name of Arse Monkeys

Needs a little polish in the graphics department, but* it was surprisingly easy to put together. Looks like Flixel has some serious potential for future Beercave releases :D

* hehe - I said "butt"!

Daft little game I knocked together over a weekend to test out the Flixel game dev library - it's pretty nifty.

Protect your bananas from the dreaded arse monkeys with your trusty rocket launcher.

Clock's ticking if I want to get Sheep Snaggers 2 finished by the end of year deadline, and I've not touched it in months. Too busy twatting around with other stuff.

So I'm looking at the code for the first time in fuck knows how long, and basically it's a big heap of shit. What asshole wrote this crap? Oh wait...

Think I need to just throw the lot away and start again. maybe do some actual design this time...

I've noticed the frame rate on Gun Bastard has a tendency to plummet when things get a bit splodey, so I should probably start looking at optimising the code a little before I go any further.
Since the explosions are the most obvious source of slowdown, at least some of the problem is likely down to object creation overhead on the various particles I'm chucking about the screen.

In order to minimise the overhead, I thought I should investigate object pooling.

I found the rather excellent looking 3D Heroes via the TIGsource forums.

I love the 3D pixellated look they've got going on there - think I might have found the aesthetic I was looking for for my Space Harrier game.