Our first project will be Snake. It's an excruciatingly simple concept: on a grid, an object controlled by the player moves around with a tail following behind it. Other small objects will appear, and the player's goal is to move their "snake" over those objects. Every time the player consumes another object, the snake's tail will grow in length.
Not only will this be simple to program, it will be simple to design, and will require little art. I expect we will have no trouble meeting the deadline of next Tuesday (February 22nd), and in fact, may complete it earlier.
Our design will include some slight alterations. To begin with, support for power-ups would be ideal. The original snake gameplay is fairly boring, so anything that can increase the enjoyability of the game would be useful. However, power-ups can easily be added in after the core gameplay is finished, with no real issues, so we will ignore them until we're done with the basics.
More importantly is multiplayer. Local multiplayer is a must, and I'd like to stress that almost every game we produce will at least have some form of multiplayer. Right now, I'm avoiding having to write network code (although, it is sort of my specialty) because it can take quite a long time to get right, and introduces many bugs that are hard to track down in a small amount of time (for instance, a week). But, if we complete our Snake clone significantly before our deadline, it might be possible for us to include online multiplayer as well.
On a final note, I'd like to speak about the first piece of code that will be written: a simple graphics loader based off of XML. It will function in such a way that creating "skins" for games will be easy -- which, when we actually get a real artist on board, will easily allow him or her to create images for the game; testing them out would be the simple procedure of placing them in a directory and reloading the game.
I'll be posting daily (possibly even more) on Project #1's status. I'd like to have the XML-based graphics loader complete by the end of today (Tuesday).
"...almost every game we produce will at least have some form of multiplayer. "
ReplyDeleteGood choice.
Better choice? Two-player co-ops! There's just not enough of those!
"Better choice? Two-player co-ops! There's just not enough of those!"
ReplyDeleteVery true.
It's definitely something that's a high priority for me, even if I don't think it's too fun, someone might like it, so if it isn't a huge pain, I'll try to add it.