Fun Infused Friday - Happy Bug Done Edition
11/18/2011
FIN, Volchaos
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Volchaos is pretty much done! That's exciting news. I've been devoting pretty much 100% of my free time to finishing this game for the past few months. I finally took some time last night to relax and went to bed early (well, early for me, late for pretty much everyone else). It's been a really long grid (Volchaos is my longest in development game, I started it in February of this year) and it feels great to be nearly at the end (well, at least until I start on the PC version).
Volchaos
As of last night, my TODO list for Volchaos was TO-DONE (at least briefly it was). I did add one more late addition, redoing the backgrounds on all the level intro graphics (as suggested in a recent playtest), but this should only take a couple hours of work to complete. I fully believe I will be able to put Volchaos into Peer Review in the next couple days. While that means I could release Thanksgiving week, I really don't think that is the best time for a video game release. For the moment I'm targeting the week after Thanksgiving though I haven't decided the exact date yet. I do need to make sure there aren't an big releases coming that week also, releasing against Halo: Reach didn't work out so well with my release of Hypership.
The last big issues I had to deal with in Volchaos was a strange collision detection issue with the jumping flame enemies. When moving enemies, I independently move the Y and then X axes. This allows me to know when a collision happens (I use rectangle collision boxes) what direction they shouldn't be able to move anymore. After each Y and X movement and check, the enemy should be left in a state where they are colliding with nothing. And yet somehow I was ending up with the occasional enemy that was colliding on their Y axis immediately before doing the X movement and check. This would result in an apparent X axis collision and move the enemy (incorrectly) to the right or left edge of the collision area.
After spending two nights trying to figure out how this was possible (my conclusion, it's not but it does happen), I decided to do something I consider hack-ish. I knew there was somehow a Y collision occurring when there should not be, so I just added a check in the X axis collision method to see if a Y collision occurred first and adjust before doing any X axis collision business. This adds an extra collision detection check for each enemy each frame of gameplay, but that wasn't enough to be noticeable at all in gameplay. And while it isn't the perfect solution, it is a workable solution. Sometimes when you've been working on something for a really long time, making it work is good enough.
Other Stuffs
I've been thinking a lot about what I should be working on next. Generally I tend to have one major project that is my focus and then a couple other side projects I work on here and there. I've already committed to finishing World of Chalk, Nastier, a WP7 port of Abduction Action! and a new version of Trivia or Die. That's a lot of stuff already! I'd additionally like to do some Hypership iOS updates (including an IAP or two) and further explore future iOS development (either a port or a new game, I'm not totally sure). I should probably finish most (or all) of these current projects first before starting on something new but a big part of me really wants to dig into a brand new game idea as well. So much I want to do, so not enough time to do it all.
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