17 1 / 2012
XNA Game in a Week - The Experiment
Continuing on, the next week’s discussion was on game mechanics, generally when you play a game and are developing it iteratively by yourself, your first goal is to create your “toy”, your core game play mechanic which is the center of your game. This is usually centered around a theme or genre. For this week’s specifation, we came up with things we generally see as these themes in games we play. Topics such as gravity, time, direction all came up. The topic that was decided on however was speed, and so this weeks task. Make a game that incorporates speed.
It could be anything we wanted, it just had to revolve around speed.
I did have another modules assignment due at the time of this work being set, so the quality suffered tremendously, which I’m not particularly happy about. It wasn’t the most original idea either. When I think of speed, I generally think of the screen moving really fast (thank you Sonic franchise), and with me only knowing 2D so far, a sidescroller was my general idea (much like the gamemaker project I initally did) but instead of collecting points, the player would be collecting speed. By passing over speed pads the player gradually gains speed, and has to maintain it over a period of time.
Main issues, the scrolling background algorithm was not precise enough, so I have an issue for the background slightly jumping every so many frames. The initial positioning of the speed pads is also static at the top right every time the game is run. The most game making bug, is the final 3 seconds on the timer, something in my code makes the graphics skip so many frames that it appears to go from 3-5 seconds to the time up status in one second. It is most likely in the status checking code which was added at the end before submission as it was working without this issue before that point, but no point crying over spilt milk.
So while graphically not the most appealing thing, I’ll leave with a video of my game on the topic of speed, and as a side note, all the sounds and music are from S4League and is copyright of pentavision, neowiz and alaplaya. This will never be released in the state it is ._.
In retrospect what I would love to do now is not only fix that ending bug but have the arrow carry on and try to hit a dart board, and the speed at which it hits determines what happens. Would be a funny edition and seems appropriate now I look at it.
