i’ve been showing a the preview of Jaguar Strike around and it’s come as something of a surprise to me but people are taking it rather… well, seriously as a game and i’ve even had an offers of a soundtrack and playtesting! As a result of all this attention for something i essentailly slapped together from a prototype framework to see what it was capable, i suspect i’ll be doing something similar and giving it a little more attention than i originally intended and it’s getting background scrolling… and yes, i know that Project 1 is presently stalled because i didn’t have a map editor for it but i’ve literally just finished building a simple one so both projects will benefit!

Now i just have to be (relatively) serious about Illogistix as a project and actually build a WordPress template for this blog or something!!

i had a really good idea for a new command for the wave manager and it seemed like an incredibly simple feature to add as i was tootling home from Asda; simply have a “nudge” value for the nasty angle so that when a wave is being created using the script’s repeat function, each nasty in the wave is nudged on a few degrees on from the previous one. The nudge would mean that what previously took an item in the script for each of nine nasties moving in a “fan” could be done with a single entry…. but when the time came to implement this wonderous feature, the damned object oriented code with it’s stupid bloody linked list decided it didn’t want to play and i spent several hours getting incredibly frustrated and swearing at it. A lot. Until it was “persuaded” to do as it was told!

Since it works rather well (at least, it does after that painful installation), this feature will just have be passed on to the Bullet Mechanics framework and, whilst i was in a good mood at Jaguar Strike, it gained variant of that framework’s newly-added multi-bullet firing mode.

Things are moving on with project 2, currently nicknamed Jaguar Strike for no better reason than my wanting to write a game that started with the letter J. Here’s a piccy:

Jaguar Strike - grabbed during a boss battle

It even has a rudimentary title page and runs as a complete loop now rather than just being the game and bailing back to Windows when the player dies or quits. Playing through the attack waves already defined takes me about a minute, although an inexperienced player who doesn’t know where they’re coming from’ll probably need closer to two.

Since project 1 has “stalled” whilst i get around to writing a tile-based map editor for it and a few other projects, i need another smaller project (something needs to get out of the door and the Bullet Mechanics games are going to take a while!) and it’s going to be something of a social experiment, at least that’s how i’m justifying it to myself! [Ahem] Y’see, i’ve been playing a huge number of shoot ‘em ups recently, some freeware and others commercial, and something odd struck me; for some reason, even the games that should seem bland and uninteresting were keeping me playing for longer than i’d expected them to, getting into that shoot ‘em up player’s zone in the process. And the question bugging me is “is this just me” or do other people play games just for that zoning out enjoyment factor?

So i’m going to build a small-ish shoot ‘em up, incorporate a “phone home” feature that sends a couple of usage stats back to base along with highscore information and then release it (with warnings about the way it sends data to the server and options to disable it) onto as many freeware download portals as possible. Hopefully people will play it in the spirit it’s meant and i’ll get some data back that might go some way towards answering my question…