sheep snaggers

Took me a while, but I finally got around to building Mac versions of Sheep Snaggers and Markie's Revenge.

Since the only mac I have access to is at work, testing was limited to making sure the built apps would run - let me know if anything falls over in interesting and unusual ways...

Following a successful weekend's testing at Retrovision, Sheep Snaggers v1.0 for windows is now available from the downloads page

We now have rudimentary joystick support!
Don't know if I'll get a chance to add an option to configure the button layout, so for now it's button 1 to thrust, button 2 to fire and button 3 to bomb, which works pretty well with my USB dualshock adapter. I can probably add some kind of config file to set up the buttons, doubt I've got the time to write any UI though.
Steering with the stick feels way more like classic Sinistar, rather than the Asteroids style rotation with the keys.

OK, that seems to have fixed it.

Turns out Rabbyt caches textures internally, so just reloading the images for my sprites didn't make any difference.

A little bit of digging around in the source and I managed to work out how to empty the texture cache. Once that was done I just had to refresh the textures for anything already existing and everything was happy again.

Of course, now I've found a new problem. All my sound effects seem to be playing about 0.5 seconds out of sync with the game. Grr...

Been adding a few more things in, of which more details later.

Right now, I'm working on being able to switch the game to fullscreen mode.
Switching modes is simple enough, but suddenly all my sprites are rendering as solid white blocks. The only things displaying properly are a couple of things that are dynamically loaded.

Looks like I need to reinitialise all my textures when I switch video mode, which is gonna mean a wee bit of rearchitecture...

Damn!

Ladies and Gentlebeasts. We are now 100% feature complete!

Updated the alien generation code. Enemies are no longer spawned en-mass across the map at the start of the game. Instead, they warp in to the base star location every few seconds. Calms things down considerably from before where the deathstar was being completed in seconds.

Need to fine tune the ship handling and fire rate a little, maybe the bullet speed too - right now it's way too easy to hit an alien that's anywhere nearby.

Tweaked the attract screen for added psychedelia - starting to look pretty damn good :D

Next job is either enemy fighters or a deathstar that's actually dangerous. Reckon I need to equip it with some suitably scary weaponry.

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.