Today’s version is a major revision. I’ve decided not to go musical. More strategic. Larger in size. With gravity and planets and bases and maybe convoys and a UNIVERSE. I’ve got a vision, it’s partially inspired by this game I played many years ago which I just can’t remember the name of. But maybe that’s for the best- with all the fuzzy edges of a distant memory, I’m free to reinvent details without being chained to what’s already been done, and with the rose-tinting of the past, all I remember is what I liked about it.
In any case, the music idea is out. Partially because I was browsing through steam and found this. It’s not exactly what I would have done, but it’s close enough that I probably don’t want to be competing with it.
Anyway, MY game is now newtonian, much larger in scale (Well, it’s more that everything has shrunk, but whatever), and has some background to give some perspective for how fast you’re moving.
Controls: WASD keys do slightly different things. Mouse scroll wheel zooms in and out. Everything else is the same, I think.
The enemies have a kind of weird behaviour. They’re newtonian too, but they’re not smart enough to start slowing down until they’re REALLY close to you. So they’ll tend to shoot by at insane speeds. Move to the side, and you can get them to start orbiting you, which is kind of funny, but not really good enemy behaviour.
They do cheat a little- there’s a ring around the player that slows them down a lot, that was what kept them from bouncing back and forth forever back when it was non-newtonian, last version (A large damping factor in their simple harmonic motion, for the physics nerd). But the only way it won’t look like they don’t basically teleport into you or shoot right by is a smarter AI routine, that is intelligent about when it starts slowing down, which is I guess I have to work on. I think I need to meditate on it for a while, though.
Note that the world is indeed so large now, that it will take quite a while for the enemy to get to you. Just wait for it.
Also worth noting: I’ve introduced a couple of .pngs. They’re vastly smaller than the .tgas, and still support alpha, so that seems like an easy decision.