Prototype 2

As mentioned in the first post, I will give somewhat regular updates to the project and post them here.

Just a heads up: Previously, I’ve talked about one or two updates a month. I still wish to follow that projection, but this first one fits nicely in my personal schedule.

Making things snappier

The first prototype felt a bit slow in my opinion. While I do aim at for an asteroids-like game, I’d like it to be not as floaty as that and maybe lean more towards action. After all, combat will be the primary gameplay mechanic.

As a first step, I’ve increased acceleration and friction for the player. The ship is still floaty, but less of a hassle to navigate. I’ve also thought about preserving speed when turning to increase the perceived (and real!) agility. That would stray a lot from “asteroids-like” though, so I’ve put that idea aside for now. I might still explore that one later.

I’ve also noticed combat feeling a bit unfair. You pretty much need to move about in order to avoid enemy shots. Prototype 1 presents you with very little room to do so, though, as moving quickly results in the camera panning away from the enemy. This discourages the player from making use of movement. Very unfortunate considering movement should play a vital role in combat.

So, I needed a way to enable to track enemies better while moving. So let’s try an old trick: Zoom the view out when moving.

This is very effective. It helps a lot in keeping track of things going on around you and allows for more room to maneuver. The view zooms back in when decelerating, so you still get a more detailed view when needed. Additionally, it helps selling a sense of speed or, more precisely, acceleration.

HUD and enemy indicators

One problem remains, though: Not all enemies present in the stage will fit on your screen. While scrolling is one of the main concepts of the game, it will lead to off-screen enemies surprising or sniping you - even if zoomed out.

So I’ve added off-screen enemy indicators. These help a lot and integrate nicely into the HUD system I’ve been working on anyways. Speaking of the HUD: There is one now! It shows your remaining life as well as how long until your dash move is ready.

A bit more gameplay

While I focused on core movement mechanics on this release, I’ve also added a new prototype enemy: The green one (yeah, very creative). It will try to approach and circle you, shooting every few seconds. It is intended to be a still pretty basic, but slightly harder variant of the previous red one.

Both enemies now also shoot smaller bullets, exercising the bullet type system. Bullets are now also spawned per-stage and reused by all entities that shoot them (in contrast to each entity having it’s own private pool before). Makes things much easier and reduces memory consumption a bit.

More mouse support

The DOS and Windows versions now include mouse support. DOS should work with pretty much any mouse that has Microsoft-compatible drivers. This includes manufacturer-provided drivers from Microsoft, Logitech and so on, universal drivers like CTMOUSE as well as emulated interfaces provided by operating systems like Windows 95 and OS/2 2.1 as well as hypervisors and emulators like Linux DOSEMU and DOSBox / DOSBox-X.

The Windows version supports, well, all mice supported by Windows. Things work fine on all Microsoft Windows versions as well as Wine. Input seems overly sensitive on ReactOS though - not too sure why.

Software renderer improvements

The black lines very prevalent in prototype 1 are now mostly gone (though some edge cases remain). There seem to be some inaccuaries in texture mapping left. Not too sure where exactly. I will look at things later.

I’ve also tweaked the code a bit to make things run faster. Performance seems fine on a 486DX2-66 for now. We’ll see how things go.