Rectango Updates

I've got most everything working - and under a pretty good clip even on the G3 at work - including controls, rendering and basic collision detection. I don't have scoring working - but that's because the core gameplay is still in flux. I was working with the "connect four" concept last night and it just wasn't clicking (in terms of fun). I may try the stacker concept next (balance all the squares in a row while catching more). Playing a puzzler concept is interesting. For one thing, I can see why Tetris style games prefer small playing fields - because larger ones simply become a chore (just while playtesting I found myself only being concerned with the middle of the screen).

What's nice is that because I've got not middleware at all - it is very quick to completely rewrite how the controls or collision detection works. If I want the player pawn to move 10 pixels at a time and no more - I just change a couple lines. Move constantly or accelerate? Couple more lines. Collide into each other or just the player? Change out some status calls. There's nothing in there that doesn't need to be in there, so there's no confusion about what needs to be changed.

Whether that gets me to actually finish it remains to be seen, of course. And making a universal binary looks like it will be a pain, so I'll have to recruit a co-worker with an Intel Mac to recompile for that branch before I can even worry about a Windows version.




tagged: game, gaming