New shader, new screenshots

Not got much done this week for family reasons, but the things I did do are rather visual so easy to show off. First I changed the width and height of the game, to 640 x 480. This is not as that will be the final size (though having it non-square does make the gameplay a little more interesting), but more so I could track down any dependencies on the screen size that shouldn't be there. I want to be able to change two numbers and everything updates.

Two more screenshots

I took a bit of a break this week for the bank holiday, but otherwise have kept working on the game. The front end is in, though not working, and I've been adding code to handle starting and restarting the game without it falling over or running out of memory.


Mostly though I've been working on graphics, trying to fix a glitch in the way the gradient shaded circles are drawn. This was a subtle glitch in game but rather more obvious in the front end so it was time to fix it.


I tried creating two new shaders for it but that didn't work as expected, because of some oddity in how Pixel Bender shaders handle alpha in Flash. So I decided used a different approach relying on an existing shader and some BitmapData API calls, especially copyPixels.


It was a subtle glitch, probably only visible to me as I knew it was there, but it's now hopefully fixed. The rendering code becomes a little more complex but it's not code that runs every frame or few frames; at most it runs a few times a game.

Two more screenshots

Two more screenshots, showing two different levels, in the much improved inverted colour scheme. I still haven't decided how to use this, so am alternating between it and the normal, light lines on a dark background, mode to make sure it works as well and get some idea of how to fit it in. Currently they are the second and fourth levels; early levels which accounts for the simple colour schemes.

Update, new screenshot

I've been quiet on my game for a week (except for discussing a shader I made for it) but I've still been busy, on two main things. One is a graphical overhaul, involving the shader but also a new way of drawing filled rings and a lot of tweaks to make it work, which I finished last week.

Oops

I've been working on the front end, which also means I've been deciding how many levels, what distinguishes them etc. It's very different from Bug Tunnel Defense where every level was designed individually. Here the levels are mostly numbers. But at the same time I've been changing and adding things to make it easier to introduce elements progressively, and make for a more varied experience.

While testing some of these changes I generated the above screenshot, which is a really bad way to start a game (hence the title), but is also more aesthetically pleasing than the usual cluttered mess of the screenshots the game produces. It shows off some elements of the game much more clearly than usual, although they really need to be seen in motion to appreciate.

Five new screenshots

It's two weeks since I lasted posted any screenshots. Lots of changes since then, most of them graphical. All of the core gameplay is in now, although much needs to be done, not least a front-end.

More shaders

I wrote two new Shaders today. One is for a screen that's not in the game yet, which the Shader will be a fundamental part of. As the Shader is rather complex I wanted to write it first to see if what I wanted to do was possible. It seems to work, so now I need to write the code for that screen.


The second is much simpler. It does edge detection on the layer I added yesterday, to highlight the boundary of the region indicated. The Shader code is very straightforward and it took much less time than either of the other Shaders I've done for this game.

Screenshots

Catching up today after spending much of yesterday performing my civic duty, and spent some time adding a new graphical layer that slots between existing layers in just the right way. I had to re-work a few things to get it right, but the result not only looks better and helps a lot in the gameplay but is a little more efficient to draw.

Linked lists + screenshots

I moved some of my data structures over to linked lists today, in preparation for adding more functionality and gameplay. I was once fairly sceptical of their applicability in Flash but I've been persuaded around by the performance work I was doing a few months ago. In particular the overhead of accessing array (Vector or Array types) members is non-trivial, comparable to other function calls. I may do some performance tests to confirm this but I'm pretty sure this is an optimal solution for what I'm doing.

New screenshot

A lot more circles in this one, and more colours, or at least it's making much more use of them. The game's not fundamentally different to last time, it's mostly a lot of subtle changes.

Update: another screenshot, below the fold, after another small change

Screenshots

New screenshots; three of them this time so they're below the fold

Screenshot and update

Busy today, so so just enough time to do another screenshot. This includes the text I wrote about yesterday (though I've rewritten that code to make it more flexible), the lives indicators, and some more gameplay elements that are too complex to describe.

It's still is missing some major elements before it's really a playable game, though those in a way are the easiest bits to put in. Then lots of tweaking and improving, not least of the graphics which I've been adding to but haven't looks at changing.

New screenshot, Flex update

Another screenshot, with the newest additions called at the moment 'snakes'. As always none of this is final, with the colours easily changed by changing a single line. It doesn't show any actual gameplay.

Another screenshot

This is a screenshot of my latest code with the Shader in effect. It's a bit of a cheat actually as I had to slow it down 10x so I could take a screenshot. Which is a way of saying a static screenshot doesn't really give an idea of how it looks in action, at 60fps with everything moving.

 Also the game now uses no art assets: everything is procedurally generated. I don't rule out using art in the final game but for now it's quicker and easier to work in code where I change a few numbers to completely change the look and feel of things.

Another screenshot

Busy again, so just another screenshot. This maybe gives a better sense of some of the things in yesterday's screen shot. Lots of fun figuring out how to do [dozens of] smooth, multicoloured particle trails without killing a 60fps frame rate.

New screenshot

Another screenshot from the work in progress, currently called "Rings".

One distinguishing feature so far is there's very little art: it's almost all procedural, and what art there is may be dropped eventually. The lack of colour is temporary: because it's all code I can add colour by just changing a line. The black and white is mostly for contrast so I can see what's going on.

New screenshot

A screenshot from something I'm working on. Yes, it has circles in it.

And a tip, if you're developing on a Mac. Turn on Web Sharing (under Sharing in System Preferences), then set the path Flash builds the SWF and HTML to something like "../../Sites/xxx", where xxx is the file name of each. Then you can access it in the browser using the IP address of your machine and the HTML file name, as above. No need to upload it to a separate site for network testing. It's still a local file so will work locally in the debugger or standalone Flash player just fine.