Tuesday 22 July 2014

02 - Land Control 1.1 COMPLETE - 2 player game

Although I could do a lot more with this game I'll consider it finished for now.

Link to the completed game

Controls:
RED:
- WASD to move

- Left Control to fire a normal shot (Ideally this would've been left shift but shift causes problems)
- Space to fire your laser beam

BLUE: (MAKE SURE THAT NUMLOCK IS ON)
- 8456 to move (on the keypad to the right on the keyboard)
- Enter to fire a normal shot (on the keypad to the right on the keyboard)
- 0 to fire your laser beam (on the keypad on the right of the keyboard)


I finally fixed the sprite bug that caused the land to look all weird. I figured out that it was only when the land should be switching into a 'flat on all sides' sprite that it was failing to do so. The solution is kind of embarrassing. To execute this code (and all the other wall sprite changing codes) , the wall MUST have at least one space free on any one side. I don't even know why I thought it was a good idea to program it that way to be honest. The game played fine as soon as I deleted it (except for another weird bug but we'll ignore that =P).

The balancing didn't quite work and I think this is very much due to having never figured out how to implement the wall falling mechanic. In play-tests the laser beam is fairly underused but not loads. It's benefits mostly come from combining it with the normal shot, which is interesting in itself.
If I'd have properly implemented the wall falling mechanic however, the laser beam would've been much more useful as it would allow the player to cut off pieces of land without fail whereas the normal shots can be prevented from completely cutting off areas of land. I actually think the wall bomb would've been a bad mechanic to add with hindsight since the point of it is to counter the loss of land caused by the laser beam but since the laser beam. Since the laser beam is less powerful in this version of the game, it would've practically prevented an end-state caused by loss of land. This is an end-state I wanted the game to have.

If I had more time (and programming knowledge) I would have:
- Gotten the land to fall how it was supposed to
   - added the wall bomb to the game
- Made the game online (The controls would instantly get better due to having a whole keyboard to each player + many other benefits)
- Made a three and four player version of the game. Might be interesting.
- Made the characters more distinct in how they play.
- Made more variety in characters to play as, with different move-sets and tweaked variables etc.
- MORE JUICE!

Basically, I think this game has the potential to work very well on an online games website like kongregate.









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