CHA-CHA-CHA-CHANGES

A lot has happened in just a few days so this is going to be a fairly sizable update to go with some big changes to my game...

The other evening in my games session my Duck Pond game took a harsh beating from Brad (my games tutor). Rightly so I have to say, the game at that stage was very simple and there wasn’t much to it. In my defence I must say it has taken me this long (80% of the project time) to get to this far with the coding… and it’s been a one hell of a struggle! (thanks for the continuous help & tutoring with this Adam & others)

Negativities aside myself and Brad set about coming up with changes and additions to improve and add more depth to the game play. The set brief states my submission has to be a platformer; my game seems to be stretching the platform concept a little, so to drop it into that category I have given the avatar some movement. The position and perspective of the avatar has changed, the old lady now faces towards the pond from the bottom of the screen and she can move LEFT and RIGHT only (using the arrow keys). When she disappears off the stage in one direction, she will appear on the opposite side of the stage. This actions isn’t very ‘realistic’ I know but this ability will boost the game play somewhat.

I have also changed the crosshair as show in the previous post; to be honest I implemented the target crosshair on the fly just to test out the mouse over and out function. I didn’t realise until later that it gives off the wrong connotations... SNIPE THE DUCK!

I’ve now dropped the idea of a shop / store menu at the start of the game, only because the requirements to make this happen are way out of my coding league. Don’t get me wrong I don’t want to seem like the wuss who isn’t prepared to challenge himself but believe me when I say that this simple game concept is challenging my coding skills enough! To compensate for this loss of the shop menu I am going to implement a difficulty setting, easy (2 good ducks, 1 bad duck) medium (1 of each) and hard (1 good duck, 2 bad ducks) this I can accomplish easy enough with-in the time given.

My next step is to work out how to create selectable items, very much like an inventory or a weapons selection function. I’m going to have another item or two for the player to choose between other than just bread. This also makes up somewhat for the missing out the shop / store menu again.
IF I can get this function running it opens up a whole variety of different game play modifiers, for example I could have point based rewards if the players scores X amount.

Another bug has developed with-in the game, if a thrown item crosses over a duck before landing the score goes crazy! This happens because the ducks are repeatedly hit testing with the item whilst it’s still on the move, another issue to fix.

Play about with the current version HERE, it is a lot different from previous versions, use the LEFT & RIGHT arrow keys on your keyboard to move the old deer about. If you do play please leave a comment telling me what you think. It’s still very much in development but I can see an end in sight.