Moon Landing Hoax

What?! Moon landing? Hoax? ...Has what to do with game design? Don't worry, I don't know either. The metaphor I wanted to use as a title for this posting was the term used by NASA that means: to take advantage of the gravity of a large astral body (planet or moon) to boost the trajectory of a space craft. I think it's called sling-shotting... But anyways, when I was Googling and Wikipedia-ing to find that term all I found was Moon Landing Hoax crap, so I ran with it. :P

Anyways.....

Seems I was busy during the time of my last post, huh? Sick too? Huh. I was thinking just the other day that I couldn't remember the last time I was sick... apparently it was September 15th. :P Also I was neck deep in the code that would lead to my fancy arena-based combat game. Well... times change.

The reason for my post title that I wanted - one that implies a sudden change of trajectory - is just that. I've changed trajectory once again. I feel that this change will not slow down my progress toward my main goal at all. In fact, I think it will be a better means to the End. The intent of my trajectory change was with my original specific goal in mind: I aim to complete a game. I aim to release a game. Now, I aim to gather the experience I need to make a full game start to finish. I will never produce my dream game if I don't. It's just too big, too deep, too involved, and I don't have that kind of time or resource.

So my quest for a game to produce and produce quickly began. I have been thinking intently on this purpose for some time, and I've come to decide that it needs to be simple. It needs to involve a very little effort in coding and still maintain playability, fun, and excitement. I would also like it to involve multiplayer if possible (Okay, so maybe all this crap isn't as simple as simple could be. I'm stupid and stubborn). Ultimately, the genre which came to mind is... a Space Shooter! Wee! Now I'm not the biggest space shooter fan in the world, but I do enjoy them. I like the thrill of dodging incoming bullets (excitement that I mentioned). I think I can easily and quickly make a space shooter above and beyond the norm in various ways:

First, free-flight! I'm sure it's been done before... in fact, one of my first memories of video games involved a flight-based 2D shooter game with what basically boiled down to free-flight. LOOPING! (Great game... HARD game) Also, Defender comes to mind... The one thing that annoys me about the genre is the on-rails approach they almost all take. I understand that it's neat memorizing the patterns of wave after wave of attacks so you can blast through it on your 13th try, but I'm ultimately much more interested in scouting around trying to find areas where you can approach how you want, where you want, and just blow stuff up (the fun that I mentioned above).

Second, growth! You know, this is also something that's been done to death with the genre. You get pickups, you shoot bigger lasers, you get pickups, you get bombs, etc. I'm much more interested in investment... in rewards for efforts made. RPG systems do this excellently, and I don't understand why shooters haven't gone that route sooner. The beauty of RPG systems is, most of the actual growth logic is done statistically - aka adding numbers, boosting stats, earning moneys. It adds infinite depth for very little coding effort (that's the simplicity that I mentioned).

Third, multiplayer! I am unaware of a single space shooter type game where multiplayer is more than just the single player experience with another ship flying around. That's all well and good... actually quite fun, but it boils down to pattern memorization times two. There's no real team work. There's no real accomplishment. It's dated. While this will probably be the most difficult aspect to integrate, and thus probably the last thing I come to, what I'd really like to do is take advantage of the 2D free-roaming mechanics that I setup for the single player game and turn it into a sandbox for all sorts of crazy ship dogfighting. Why not make it 32-player free-for-alls, or team based objective games, or races? HRM? Why indeed? But I'll focus on that later...

For now, just know that things are going well. I've already got the project set up. I've already gotten past several major hurdles, such as an effective input control system, a 2D scene system with parallax scrolling and all that jazz, and a game management system which will allow me to control the game with little effort. This is all stuff I struggled with in past projects, so I'm already making amazing progress here. Stay tuned for more specific ideas, smaller scale goals, pictures, progress, and those such things. WHOOO!