To start with I basically recreated some of the Asteroids game with slight modifications. Ship movement is similar, though a reverse thrust was added.
Ship design looks a little like a side view of a TIE fighter, though that was coincidental. An octagon shape seemed cloes enough to a circle for good collision detection purposes, and having lines that come from every corner to meet in a smaller octagon in the middle was basically a simple way of having a sort of "net" design. For the most part it is transparent, with the idea being that something could be attached to the net ship on either side and be visible--though realistically I imagine it will be hard to see much of the far side with the near side in the way.
For testing purposes I've just got one Asteroids-style "asteroid", with several palette swaps. Realistically having enough sprites for objects of different sizes will be a limiting issue for a non-artist like me, but I'll get back to that another time.
In testing how I could layer objects onto the ship, I learned a bit about GameMaker surfaces. Basically a surface is something that things get drawn to. The image that gets output to the screen is the default surface, but you can create other ones to do more complicated effects before bringing things back to the main view. I've had some dumb problems trying simply to copy the ship shape and get it 100% perfect, but for now I'm willing to live with 90% perfect, especially since with things being layered all over each at various scales the little details are probably not going to be very easy to see anyway.
The ship has a mass, as do asteroid objects. As the ship gains mass, asteroids scale down. When the ship grows it stays the same size on screen--having a giant ship on screen would not be very manageable, though it won't look as exciting for the player. I've got a test button to change the ship's mass, at which point asteroids automatically scale down.
Shooting an asteroid creates two or three smaller asteroids, which will have mass totalling 60-100% of the original one. As previously stated for now everything is just the one shape; in the future I'll have something like an array so it will check what kind of sprites are allowed for an item that's supposed to be a certain size. Initially when setting this up I forgot to make the bullet disappear, which meant it kept shooting the newly created asteroids and I ended up with little rocks all over the place!
Any asteroid that's sufficiently small disappears. I think I currently have it set to 0.1% the ship mass. This should help prevent an overwhelming number of little specks flying all over the place.
Though nothing yet naturally attaches to the ship, I have a layering testing system in place. I have a separate sprite for things on the back side and on the front side. If I press one button, the back sprite shrinks a bit, then has a new farthest-out item layered at a semi-random location on the far side. Another button shrinks the near sprite, and adds a new asteroid on top of it. A third button then layers the back, ship, and front in that order, and saves the result to a new sprite that becomes the new look for the ship.
This basically brings us up to speed on the current state of Zenzenzen. Probably the next thing I want to work on is having things naturally layer onto the ship when it collides with a small enough object, rather than just happening at the touch of a button.
Comments