So this is my first progress report on the game I hope to have ready for the Codea Play competition. The working title is Black Hole (EDIT: since renamed to Time Winders to reflect the emphasis on time manipulation during gameplay (EDIT: since renamed to Spacetime cos it sounds cooler)). The story goes that an inhabited solar system’s star is about to explode. Your job is to guide a number of airborne (spaceborne?) ships to their home planets so that they can teleport to safety before the impending black hole swallows them. But you’re just one person, who can only guide one ship at a time. In order to get all the ships to safety in time, you’ll have to manipulate time itself. Also if you could try not to cause any collisions that would be super!
Title/Menu screen and level design (levels are currently randomly generated)
Change from “matching ships to planets” to “matching planets to worm holes”. Makes more sense and ups the stakes somewhat - saving whole planets instead of just a few ships :).
Make the sun and background (and possibly the planets) appear to spin in the direction that time is currently travelling. The worm holes will probably be constantly spinning.
Improve the “you lost” screen a bit. I’ll try to do an “everything being sucked through the black hole” animation.
Create a level complete screen.
Various game mechanics improvements and bug fixes.
Special thanks to Simeon as I’m currently using his starfield code for my backdrop (hoping that’s ok?), and am in the process of incorporating the amazing CircleMask class in an effort to get my sun to spin.
Thanks guys. Well I got my submission in on time with a whole 30mins to spare! Since the last vid I added some polish and did some specific level design (no more crazy randomly generated levels). I’ve done up a new video that’s much more self-explanitory than my initial one. Here’s what it looks like now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7SsdiueLcPc
I definitely accrued some technical debt trying to make the deadline, so now I’m going back and cleaning up the code, but then I’m going to add a level editor - primarily so I can create more levels faster, but ultimately so players can create their own levels. Hopefully there will be a way to share them … copy and paste at the very least.
Since my previous post (and thanks to some feedback from my beta testers) I’ve added tutorial levels, optional hints, an achievements system, split-screen multiplayer and moving obstacles (satellites and asteroids). If you have any feedback about the trailer or the game please chime in
Got the day off work today (woohoo!) getting some kitchen work done and of course also working on Spacetime levels. Wanted to share the one I’m working on at the moment. Just took me about 40minutes to solve on my third attempt :). This is pretty much how the level will appear in the game and the video shows the solution so … spoiler alert :P.
