May 28, 2009, 1:44 pm
Luckily SQLite just has a text type so my post titles can be infuriatingly long... mwahahaha!
So after a holiday and being busy and going to hospital for tonsillitis, I remembered my website still exists! Before I got sick I decided it would be funny to make a game based on a mural I saw on a garage in San Franciso:
So I thought it would be funny, knocked up a little music in milkytracker, found a cow sound effect (because obviously unicorns go moo) and went at it. Initially I thought it would be fun to just see if I could do the whole thing from scratch in 2 hours, but sadly my effort fell short - everything was sort of there, but there was no real game to play! The problem is, I initially wanted to do it just as a joke really; but as I thought more about it (while sick) I thought it would be quite fun to have a space invaders clone that wasn't necessarily to formulaic - specifically with regards to enemy movement. My current ambition is to implement different enemy behaviours, so that the game has a more organic feel - I don't actually want the game to be 'winnable' necessarily; alien invaders by virtue of actually managing to get here would be unlikely to be thwarted by a single tenacious human adversary!
Instead I think it would be sensible to implement a finite state machine for the unicorns, and alter that as gameplay progresses to maintain the player's interest. Naturally difficulty should progress as a function of time, although I think it would be cool to alter the nature of the difficulty (not just making enemies faster, for example). So the premise of this game is space invaders, with novel enemy behaviours - kind of like... well... galaga really. But with polychromatic unicorns! Anyway, it'll be fun to program the different behaviours, which is the main point of these things for me ;)
So I thought it would be funny, knocked up a little music in milkytracker, found a cow sound effect (because obviously unicorns go moo) and went at it. Initially I thought it would be fun to just see if I could do the whole thing from scratch in 2 hours, but sadly my effort fell short - everything was sort of there, but there was no real game to play! The problem is, I initially wanted to do it just as a joke really; but as I thought more about it (while sick) I thought it would be quite fun to have a space invaders clone that wasn't necessarily to formulaic - specifically with regards to enemy movement. My current ambition is to implement different enemy behaviours, so that the game has a more organic feel - I don't actually want the game to be 'winnable' necessarily; alien invaders by virtue of actually managing to get here would be unlikely to be thwarted by a single tenacious human adversary!
Instead I think it would be sensible to implement a finite state machine for the unicorns, and alter that as gameplay progresses to maintain the player's interest. Naturally difficulty should progress as a function of time, although I think it would be cool to alter the nature of the difficulty (not just making enemies faster, for example). So the premise of this game is space invaders, with novel enemy behaviours - kind of like... well... galaga really. But with polychromatic unicorns! Anyway, it'll be fun to program the different behaviours, which is the main point of these things for me ;) 
