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Submitted for Playtest

I haven’t done any development for Resistor since I submitted it to the Dream Build Play competition on May 30th.  Therefore, I went ahead and submitted for Playtest on the AppHub website.  I guess this is what it feels like to send your first child to school.  However, I’m sure that any feedback that I do get will be helpful, which will make the game better.

There must be some tough critics out there, because the Resistor trailer video instantly received a negative vote after it was posted on the DBP website.  Therefore, I went ahead and disabled voting on the video until the competition is over.  On the other hand, the video has been getting a lot of traffic, and it is now over 125 views  just for being posted for a little over a week.  I went ahead and made the video public, because it was previously unlisted where a link was required to view the video.  I also made a YouTube playlist containing the complete series of development videos.

After taking a break from looking at the game, I did play it again for a few minutes and noticed new ways to complete some of the levels.  I probably wouldn’t have noticed this if I had not stepped away from the game for a while.  These new ways allow some of the levels to be completed with fewer pieces, so I may need to tweak the requirement for the S-rank on those levels.

Not that I’m trying to overly promote the game, but I went ahead and made pages on Facebook and Twitter for the game.  I did this more as a precaution to keep someone from taking the “resistorgame” brand name on those social media outlets.

I also created new box art for the game, and got rid of the image that I rendered in Blender.  I didn’t want to give anyone the impression that the game uses 3D graphics.  The background is an interconnected mesh of battery, LED, and resistor objects.  I also used some of the trailer quotes on the box image, but I changed “fun for the entire family” to “fun for all ages”.  The former wording could possibly sound like it is a multiplayer game, which it isn’t.

Hopefully, the playtesting goes well and it will be out on the XBox Marketplace soon.  There are some changes I may want to make before putting out the final version, such as fade-in/fade-out transitions between screens.  I also have to jump through a few other hoops before I can actually sell the software.

Stratospheric Aerosol Injection

Play online

Reduce the population using the aerosol spray from your plane. Tank refill pickups appear periodically. Avoid the projectiles shot by the radar towers.

 

 

 

 

Released

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Story Added

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1UoC2nKUsE

Attract screens included and parallax background added.

Story

Created a simple story about having to save the world from cyber terrorists who have hacked the global network.  Created an attract screen which cycles through the four story screens that I have created.  Created some really simple graphics in Gimp, which I hope to improve later.

Updated the title screen with a simple title logo that I created with Gimp.  Added logic to the title screen to use the user created world if it exists, or generate the default world if no user created world exists.

Parallax

Added a simple scrolling background to the level.  For now, I just used one of the images that I created for Resistor.  Added a parallax effect by offsetting the background image by the room offset divided by two.  That means the background is scrolling at half speed of the room.  When creating the background image, the grid option in Gimp really helped with placing the background images, which were placed over a blue to black gradient.  I could have set my background image as a pattern and used bucket fill, but that would have been more effort than needed.  My Gimp toolbox kept disappearing for some reason, and getting it to show again with the tool options was really a hassle.  Once I got the background image added to the game, there was a noticeable jump that occurs when the player crosses rooms, which will need to be fixed later.  I’m thinking about copying all of the room data to one huge array, which would solve a lot of problems like that.

Gameplay Changes

Added a check in the draw method of the game screen to determine if the player is facing right.  If so, then the player sprite is flipped horizontally.  This throws off the baked-in lighting, but it is good enough for now.

Modified the player’s jump speed to 10 (pixels per frame) instead of 5, which makes the jumps feel less floaty.  Still need to add some calculations to make jumps more parabolic and less linear.

Realized that the player’s health wasn’t getting re-initialized after dying and starting a new game.  I went ahead and created a newGame method in the game screen class which handles things like that.