i’m pretty bad at these, aren’t i… okay, so Happy Ball Is Happy has been in the wild for a while now, so time for a quick postmortem.
What went right?
This was my first attempt at an arena-based shoot ‘em up and literally the first piece of C++ code i’ve ever written, in that respect it went quite well! i’m not sure i’ll be using C++ for any further projects to be honest, but it was a learning experience and should i decide to try XNA or perhaps Java development at some point it should be a good grounding. As a game, it played pretty well and although it doesn’t appear to have even registered as a blip on most people’s radars, i quite like it so [ppphhhpppt!]
What went wrong?
The final result was rushed because i was getting annoyed with it not being out the door. There was an issue with Vista Home reported that i simply couldn’t trace (since i don’t have any Vista boxes myself and the only ones available to use for testing were running Vista Business or Ultimate) and issues with how Allegro doesn’t protect the contents of video RAM, meaning that it’s easily possible to trash all of the graphics by tabbing away and then back to the game.
What was learnt along the way?
Well, apart from a smattering of C++ the most important lesson is “yes, having spawning points works” and that was the biggie; one of the problems i’ve noted with most arena-based shoot ‘em ups has always been the enemies spawn into the play area, that means there are moment when they’ll be trying to materialise directly under the player’s sprite. The “boss” nasty in Happy Ball Is Happy means that it’s obvious where each spawned attacker is going to come from even if the player hasn’t learnt the release patterns to know what’ll be along next.
Final thoughts
It’s a hideously simple game really and has that forced cuteness that comes from not quite being able to pull off true cuteness due to a high level of cynicism, but Happy Ball Is Happy did what it was meant to and is still a giggle to play. Perhaps a sequel, redone in BlitzMax with more options, joypad controls and so forth should be on the cards…
