Games

Originally posted at http://postcardstohell.livejournal.com/70413.html
Got another nice lengthy update session in today.

We now have audio! For now, I'm using a bunch of free sounds from soundsnap.com as placeholders. Hopefully I can knock up some original ones before I get finished.

I've also hacked together a basic attract mode / high score table, which isn't looking too shabby.

Originally posted at http://postcardstohell.livejournal.com/70178.html
Finally got weapons implemented tonight :D
Now I can finally defend the sheepies against the evil aliens. It's actually starting to feel like a game now :D

Next up, I want some enemies that shoot back, then it's time to activate the dreaded MarkieStar!
Once all that's done, all that's left is the polish. Menus, high scores, level balancing, attract mode. Sound might be good...

Originally posted at http://postcardstohell.livejournal.com/70031.html
I'm sick of referring to this project as "my RV game project", so I'm officially making Sheep Snaggers at least a working title. Cheers, Amy!

Got the AI to a point that I'm pretty much happy with now. The sheep flock relatively convincingly, and the aliens hunt them quite nicely.

Unfortunately, the sheep AI is now crippling perfomance. The sweet spot for staying above 60fps looks to be around 20 sheep in my world, which kind of sucks.

Originally posted at http://postcardstohell.livejournal.com/69660.html
Had to go into town and see about changing banks today, so I didn't get as much done.

Wasn't entirely happy with the state-based sheep AI, so I switched it out for a simple flocking system. Avoidance behaviour is working pretty well - I can herd individual sheepies around with my ship pretty well - but they don't really flock yet.
I need to adjust how the enemy ships work too - they're *way* too efficient early on, then they get rubbish at hunting once the sheep are more spread out. I'm using a half-assed drunkard's walk algorithm at the minute(follow random vector for random time), switching to single-minded pursuit once a sheep comes into range. This kind of sucks on two levels - the random walk never really travels much of the world, and the chase mode is way to accurate to give the sheep a chance to escape.
Hopefully I can get the wrinkles ironed out of the behaviours sometime tomorrow so I can get on to adding the shooty parts.

Originally posted at http://postcardstohell.livejournal.com/69528.html
It's my week off, so I thought I'd get a bit of work done on a project I've been ignoring for a while. I've been widdling around in pygame/rabbyt in the hopes of getting a little game hacked together in time for next year's Retrovision.
Every year the welcome pack includes a disk with a few games on, and waaay back in June the shout went out for entries. Being my usual organised self, I played around with a few things for a week or so and never really got anything much done, but with the deadline for inclusion coming up fast I thought I'd better get my finger out.