Progress so far:

I also did a bit of work on some other games but I really don’t have much to say about them. Going back to writing code for research so my output here may drop off. Also, I don’t think I’ll be able to participate in the latest LD14 because of exams.

The game ended up playing a lot differently than I expected. I think the largest shock was how far off my estimates of playtime were. We ended up playing through the first third of the game twice(because the last 2/3’s weren’t finished yet) and each game ended up taking 45min to an hour which is just under what I would like the total playtime for the game to be. It was also nice to get constructive feedback early on.

Here’s another picture:

What I would do differently:

I would schedule another playtest about a week after the first one. Just from playing games I know that they play differently after you play them a few times and differently again later on when you master them. Also, from writing computer games I know it can be a humbling experience when after you’ve playtested your game to death and maybe had some friends play it, that some complete stranger just doesn’t get it because you aren’t there to hold their hand while they learn.  I’d like to see a playtest where I’m not involved in playing the game at all. It’s still in the early stages where every turn I want to tweak the gameplay in one way or another after every move and this came up quite a bit in the initial test.

I still have plenty of prototyping supplies sitting around and I do intend to finish it one day but who knows when that will be.

I’m still working on getting cubic beziers and stroked paths working but so far I’m very happy with the results. Because the curve is drawn using a pixel shader I never have to worry about zooming too far or having my polygon approximation of the curve be apparent which is currently the case with my gravity game. Also if you haven’t seen it check out masagin. Here’s a video if you don’t feel like downloading it, but you should because the video doesnt do it justice.

As far as I can tell he just approximates the curves with polygons and doesn’t use a shader to evaluate the actual curve. It still looks excellent but you can see that the curvature isn’t perfect when the camera zooms in really close on some of the elements. I’m working on parsing svg files at the moment so hopefully I’ll have some more examples soon, including the svg tiger.

Also here’s a zip with a few papers I’ve found if anybody else is interested in messing around with this stuff.

VectorRendering.zip

Level select screen:

And the options menu:

And here’s a download link if you want to try it out:

Download

Here’s a link:

http://www.lambdassociates.org/blog/bipolar.htm

And now I’ll go back to starting more projects I won’t finish and self aggrandizing, but that should be fairly obvious by this point if you’ve kept up with my blog.

A few hours later after writing a good amount of code this is what it looks like in game.

The trail on the particle still isn’t quite right but I’m happy with how it turned out and the animation looks pretty slick. I may upload a build later so people can try it out. Also, I’d be suprised if anybody recognizes where I got the name from.