kenmasters1976's Blog
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Ideas
This year I decided to aim for something super simple so that I have a chance to finish or at least submit an entry.
Luckily, the suitable-for-a-six-year rule will be a good excuse as I have a simple idea that hopefully will be enjoyable for a kid. It also suits for easily implementing most of the rules, except for the Brainwashing Propaganda one.
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Bubbles
Continuing with my keep-it-super-simple idea, I'm just planning to do a bubble popping game with colored bubbles.
In the image, a bunch of randomly placed, randomly colored bubbles.
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More Bubbles
Updated the bubble drawing routine so that bubbles now, hopefully, look like bubbles.
I think I ran into an Allegro bug trying to use transformations with primitives... or perhaps I'm just doing it wrong. Anyway, that'll have to wait.
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Even More Bubbles
You can now click on bubbles to destroy them. As you destroy bubbles, more bubbles pop out.
I aimed for something super simple and I guess it turned simple enough. I could add a score indicator and consider it submittable. I guess I will submit an entry this year!.
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Small Bubbles
Because just bursting bubbles is just not fun at all, I decided to try and somewhat mimic the gameplay of a flash game.
Now all bubbles start as small bubbles and as you move the mouse around you can absorb bubbles of the same color. Touching a bubble of a different color that the one you're holding will result in losing your bubble.
Proper bubble-bubble collision is not yet implemented, but it should be easy, right?.
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On the other hand...
Actually, I think that adding bubble-bubble collisions would make it too hard to navigate with a big bubble, so I might just leave it like this. The mouse cursor is practically the hotspot for absorbing bubbles.
In the flash game I mentioned, dots were static but here, with all bubbles moving around, increasing the collision radius would make moving big bubbles impossible. It may be challenging but I guess I'll leave it pending and implement it if I have time later.
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Bonus Points x 2
I added a bonus multiplier and Perfect Bubble condition checking (for when you capture all bubbles of a color in a single attempt).
Also, hitting a bubble of a different color will cost you points. That is, you can actually have a negative score.
With this, the gameplay is basically completed. Now I'm going to put it into a limited number of levels of increasing difficulty.
By the way, if the player loses many points, the game will adjust by spawning less bubbles and/or reducing the number of colors in a level, thus fulfilling the Laziness rule.
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Gameplay Done
Now the game runs through 10 levels of increasing difficulty. A simple check (perhaps too simple) decides how difficult it becomes, so a really bad player could play 10 levels just like level 1.
I also added some primitive sounds borrowed from the Allegro haiku example. It's the first time I use sound on one of my Allegro projects, too.
Oh, and by now the code looks really awful. Hopefully, the remaining code for Intro, Menu and Game Over screens will go in separate files.
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Title Screen
Added a simple Title screen. Tomorrow I'll try to add Game Over and High Scores screens.
Also, I'll try to fix sphere sizes as they're hardcoded for a 800x600 resolution, which means that if played at higher resolutions there's a lot of empty space and, on lower resolutions, too little.
There should be plenty of time for these tasks but I may not have much time to work on my entry tomorrow.
On a separate note: I thought using globals was the easiest way, but I just got bitten for having two differently defined globals with the same name.
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Entry Complete
My entry is complete. I would like to work on some details but I won't have much time left to code before the competition ends.
So now I'll just write the readme and proceed to upload my entry.
No screenshot this time. I guess you've seen plenty of bubbles already.
