Plan for Jeremy Alessi

Two games coming along ...

Oust and Tinker Blaster's Trip (formerly Nebula Wars) are both coming along well. I had a good chance a few weeks ago go adjust Oust's collisions response and it seems to be better. I still need to test the game with a lot of players to see if the accuracy keeps up but as of right now it's looking good. One other minor tweak that I want to make is to have the lunge button automatically pull out the melee weapon so that you do not have to reach for inventory buttons to switch to the melee weapon ... for guns it's fine but because the melee weapon is so crucial to getting back to safety or for making triple jumps ... it has to be quickly accessible, intuitive, and not leave you defenseless! I have to say I'm proud to have come up with a scheme in a primarily FPS game that really requires the use of the melee weapon. In most games it is COOL but just about useless ... or it's entirely too powerful .... a la Halo 2. In Oust I think it's the perfect balance between useful and not being too powerful ... but powerful enough to still count.

Tinker Blaster's Trip is the extension and hopefully perfection of the small Nebula Wars project I started. The name is pretty much just representative of the gameplay. First of all, you tinker with your ship. This isn't your standard shooter where you're given a ship and there are subsequent powerups which are out of your control. You design the look of your vector graphics ship with a cool blue print editor. There you can place joints and beams to determine the look and functionality of the ship. The more joints you add the more massive your ship becomes. This means that A) you must compensate by making the engines more powerful to move the ship out of it's own way and B) you can make more powerful guns. Everything comes out of the initial mass of the ship. Whatever mass you leave over represents the amount of damage you can take. Overall the idea is to create a balance between being a large ship that take and give more hits but is also more prone to take hits itself and making a smaller ship that's easily manueaverable but has less fire power and shields.

The firepower is interesting too. Initially I let the user tweak the size of their shots, the spread, the power, the rate of fire, and the speed. This of course was unfair. Creating really slow, big, powerful shots with a high rate of fire was devastating. So I've gone and used a bit of physics. I've taken away the power option. Now you can control the rate of fire, the size, the spread, and the speed. This way slow big shots hit more often but using the basic principle of pressure ... speed/size ... means less pressure for big slow shots. Conversely, if you make tiny fast shots they have a lot more pressure and so they cause more damage. Of course you have to be a better shot to use them.

That pretty much covers the Tinker Blaster part of the game. You tinker with a ship then go out and blast stuff. The third apsect ... is the trip. The trip allows you to control the colors, music, and sound effects of the blasting experience. I figure this will allow you to set the game up for you mood. If you're feeling dark ... you can set the game up with dark colors and hardcore rock music .... if it's Christmas you can set the game up to look like Christmas and play Jingle Bells in the background ... you will also be able to customize the sound effects for the intruders that you are shooting ... and probably the gun and ship engine as well. There's also another reason why it's called a trip ... not that I know first hand but after a few people played the game they said that it looked like an acid trip with the color bleeding effect ... so yeah I thought that was kind of funny.

Basically, Tinker Blaster's Trip will be a game about the art & science of blowing s#!^ up.

I should hopefully have the prototype done by December 13th ... it's my birthday gift to myself!