Archive for September, 2008
A decision that I took very early on in the development of Invaders from Mars was to contol rather strictly the number of alien bombs that were on the screen at any one time. I’d figured (largely from playing Do Don Pachi and other manic shooters) that this was key to the difficulty of the [...]
I’ve very much come to the conclusions that the key to turning a series of well met challenges in to something that is fun lies with meeting the player’s expectations. In order to do this we of course need to set those expectations.
With Invaders from Mars I decided to set expectations by identifying each alien [...]
Yup. This guy drops acid when hit. Imagine what an entire level full of these critters could do to your hovertank !
Some times when designing games and characters you get Eureka! moments. Realising that I really ought to expand on the cartoon / B-Movie theme with the cutesy Spaceman Spiff inspired settings and creatures was mine.
I put some work in to defining the visuals a bit more and deliberately over-egged the classic blue/orange palette. I find [...]
I’ve always been a fan of Calvin and Hobbes. Calvin’s imaginary Spaceman Spiff got me thinking.
Invaders from Mars was always something of a working title for the game whilst I finalise the technology. Since most of the technology is proven and in place I’m now spending a great deal of time on the game’s artwork. [...]
I received a couple of emails asking about the process of creating the sprites for the Invaders game.
I have to say there is nothing particularly extravagant in my approach but it may be useful for folks to learn of my prefered approach.
I use Photoshop (CS3). As an artist first and foremost it’s a tool of [...]
Fixed the number of elements in the smart bomb screen flash array.
JavaScript’s Math.round() was rounding my floating point figures up to an array index that didn’t exist.
This will have affected IE users. I couldn’t recreate the problem in Opera, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.
On a plus note it gave me the chance to look at presenting [...]
Designing a shoot ‘em up is in theory quite simple. So long as the player has a ready supply of missiles and enemies to gun down he is going to be happy. But when you start to analyse the game’s design and requirements in more detail you can see a little bit more.
I have pretty [...]
Something that has become very apparent to me in this JavaScript gaming journey is that the popular browsers all have hugely varying levels of performance. To test just how fast the browsers can crunch this code I added a new hot key to the console.
Whilst in gamemode 3 (the main game) you can now tap [...]
Something I had been toying with was a means of simply spawning explosions at any given x and y location during the game. This is particularly useful for representing a boss’s death sequence. I had already implemented pain frames for bigger adversaries so it made sense to give the player complete satisfaction by visually destroying [...]
