Based on a comment in the thread “Atari”, http://www.twolivesleft.com/Codea/Talk/discussion/comment/16344, I decided to try to write a game similar to Atari Defender. My original thought after making my comment was to see what I could actually write with Codea, and create something that others could look at an learn from. I’ve gotten that code written and will be posting an archive link to it from this thread.
There are a two libraries I borrowed from to make this work (Nat’s original Controller library and the Fireworks sample code), and an additional Utils library of my own, but the rest of the code is directly related to gameplay.
The game is “90%” complete; there’s a few bugs here and there and some gameply mechanics that need to be ironed out (as well as control rendering), but the concepts all work.
I’ve implemented hyperspace, smart bombs and shields (thanks Stargate!) as well as wave resets every 5 levels. I did not do the mutant wave (never liked it in the original, thought iw as just a way to kill off player’s ships) and I don’t have a solid High Score system embedded; I’m using a global data JSON string.
It looks really, really lovely. Over and over, I’m astounded by how well this environment can handle tasks that once required hardcore “banging the metal.”
Wonderful job, @aciolino. I wonder if, with possibly a few tweaks to the graphics to avoid the long arm of whoever-owns-the-rights-to-old-Williams-Electronics-titles, you could pop this on the App Store? You’d have my 99 cents.
Yes, me too. I’m impressed that LUA is acceptably performant on it’s own; I don’t even have to code XCode, though if I want Game Center or iAds, I might have to deal with them
That cound be fun! It would be easy to swap out the graphics (just a bunch of images so far), maybe I’ll add a “graphics pack” conversion to the code base.
I’m going to cut another video and post here with the code…maybe with a new graphics pack. What would be fun to use? Frustrated Pheasants?
Nice one @Aciolino - brilliant stuff! You may wish to check out ‘Williams Arcade’ on the AppStore ( published by Warner Brothers - who appear to hold the rights) which has a straight port of Defender ( as well as other games such as Joust, Gauntlet, Spy Hunter, Rampage - sigh…this reminds me of my youth!) - alas, as @Mark pointed out, there may be some issues there if you we’re to publish I guess :-(.
.@aciolino: hi! From the feedbacks i have the feeling that Mark and Andy have tried your code but i can’t see any links to it here. Did i miss something?
There was an old copy out somewhere…the code will be zipped and put on a GIst later this AM. Vista can’t have more than like 10 files, so I have to make a big archive. I haven’t figure out how to upload to a GIT project yet… that would be my preference for something this big.
I am fighting with the idea of making it a public DropBox point instead as that’s easier to get to, but has no source control.
https://github.com/AntonioCiolino/Cofender - has core code. You’ll also need to create and reference the Cider, Controllers, Fireworks and Utils projects. comment out all of the captureTab code at the top of each class before trying to run it.
As I can’t get GIT to work like I want it to, I just posted all the files as Packages for download. So, you’ll need a machine other than your iPad to get to the code.
@mikeyleo probably not; I don’t know how to use GitHub and I added the files to the downloads section instead of the GIT. Do you see anything in downloads?
@aciolino thanks for sharing. However it is considerable effort to download so many files from the ipad just to test the game. Could you consider putting everything in a single txt file for easy copy paste into Codea? Thanks anyway.
While that’s a good idea overall, in this case I wanted the files seperate so that it was easier to understand what is going on and where. I’m thinking of writing up how it was put together so that people can construct games themselves, in which case the seperate files will be of greater help.
That said, when I do merge them, I still end up with project dependencies of my Utils, Cider and Controllers projects, so a single file is unlikely to work anyway.
