KarBOOM! New mutator, victory conditions, and menu stuff

Post date: 04-Nov-2010 00:48:17

After a ridiculous amount of work trying to clean up my code, I've spread 3000 lines of code into 18 files. Yes, it's only about 3000 lines of code so far -- is that a lot or a little for something like this? And yes, up until now it was all in one file.

The game now has a name: KarBOOM

Capitalisation can vary, but I like it that way because it emphasises its onomatopoeic (I totally didn't look up that word) origins. I was going to have it start with the letter "C", but others preferred with a "K", so I'll go with that. Version 0.1.1 will hopefully be out by the end of this week, with two main additions:

1. The weak spot mutator, and

2. Victory conditions.

The weak spot mutator puts a glowing weak spot on the back of every car (as seen in this update's screenshot below). Let that bump into anything and you'll explode, giving points to the one who bumped your weak spot as well as knocking everyone around a bit. Protect your weak spot like your life depends on it. In the near future I plan to add a barriers mutator, but it probably won't make this week's update. The barriers mutator will block off all out-of-bounds areas to make tag and weak spot the only ways of scoring.

The other main addition is victory conditions. Choose how a round can be won. As you might have imagined, this makes the game a little more restrictive as mutators and players can only be added/removed when not in the middle of a round. In future I'll give no limit mode its own pause menu that brings back those options, since such actions can't interfere with your scoring system if the score doesn't matter. But for now you'll have to be a little patient with me, as I've got more important things to get ready before the Friday update. Anyway, these victory conditions are:

• no limit -- no victory conditions. Play as long as you want, score as high as you want, and get blown up as many times as you want.

• time limit -- the round plays for a fixed time limit. Players are ranked according to their scores when the time runs out.

• score limit -- first player to reach a certain score wins, and other players are ranked according to their scores.

• life limit -- each player starts with a pre-determined amount of lives. Every time they explode they lose a life. When you're out of lives, you're out of the game. Last player standing wins, and other players are ranked according to how long they lasted.

The screenshot shows weak spot in action in life limit mode. I still have a lot of work to do by Friday. So far some new menu options don't actually do anything, a replay can't be viewed once the round is finished, score and time limits aren't displayed, the victory screen shows very little useful information about the round, and I'm yet to add options to choose your own time limit, score limit, or life limit. So really, I've got my work cut out for me.

A couple of little things have been changed:

• The cars are now a bit brighter in colour.

• The camera is now slightly smoother and smarter. And by "smarter", I mean the camera now centres on the action better, placing cars more evenly in the view (instead of looking a bit over the action) and keeping explosions in view for a little while.

• Explosions now have a quick shockwave to help show that the physical effect of the explosion reaches much further than the dust particles it kicks up.

Thanks so much to everyone who has been playing my game, offering suggestions, and complaining about issues!

Hopefully I'll get all the menu stuff done and spruce things up a bit more by Friday.