SHOOTS

SHOOOOTS! Yes, Shoots is the "secret project" title for my current game-in-progress. Every secret project has some cryptic name before it finds a real one, and this one is just mine. Shoots!

I thought I'd mention a quick blurb about what I've done and what my current to-do is... a "progress report" if you will.

Progress
Last night I drew my crappy looking player ship in MS Paint... then I redid it with a transparent BG in GIMP cause that whole transparency thing slipped my mind. :P
Next, I had a problem with my keyboard input because the arrow keys weren't moving my ship like I originally intended. They weren't moving anything. That was actually an easy fix...
With my ship moving, I was now able to change the way the ship moved. My intent is to setup the controls thusly... Left/Right: Decelerate/Accelerate, Up/Down: Dive/Climb. So far the ship just panned around the screen though... My last task for the night was to change the Left/Right being forward/backwards to a speed-based accelerate/decelerate system. In no time, my ship was accelerating right off the screen, no sweat! However, there's a lot of work to go...

Short-Term To-Do
First thing I must do is throttle the acceleration of my ship. I don't want it to speed up undefinitely, I want it to stay within the Max speed of the ship. The speed of the ship will range from 0 to MaxSpeed (yes, the ship will be capable of speedless flight or hovering) to the left or right. I will ultimately have a key to change directions in-flight (from left-to-right and visa versa) so that the player will not have to completely decelerate to 0 to begin accelerating the other direction, but I will address that later. The second part to the acceleration is this: as long as you hold L/R you Accel/Decel gradually, but if you only tap L/R and don't hold it, you will Accel/Decel by a large amount. So, one can ultimately Accel/Decel completely within just a moment if they need to. I will likely make deceleration require less overall taps to completely stop, as immediate deceleration is arguably more important than immediate acceleration. Right now I'm thinking 1% Accel/Decel per half second held, and 20% Accel/50% Decel per tap L/R.

Second goal, I must stop my ship from accelerating off the screen!... This will never be possible in the finished game, because the camera will always be following the ship! The map will be scrolling happily away behind the ship as the camera scrolls. So, the camera must do a few fancy things... move when the ship moves, move ahead of the ship so the player can see where they're headed, and zoom out gradually the faster the ship is moving, so more of the approach is visible. With my current camera system this should be quite simple to accomplish, so we'll see how it goes. :)

If these two goals go well, I will work on restricting ship/camera movement to staying within the borders of the map. I also need to work on the whole dive/climb of the ship and the math involved with that... there will have be some fancy geometry or trig to figure out where the ship is headed when it's angle changes.


More later!! Cheers! Happy St. Patty's Day!