Apocalypse Cow Progress

In-between job interviews and Disneyland trips and handling a handful of "honey-dos" my wife has arranged for me during my current unemployment, I've managed to get a ton of progress done in Apocalypse Cow.

I've got three levels "roughed out" and playable now, and I'll be starting level 4 tomorrow. There are still LOTS of details to be taken care of, sound, and layers of polish that will need to be applied. The new helicopter isn't textured yet, and and I'm really hurting on content - just about everything is "stand-in" right now. So I can't really call them "done." But it's definitely a game now, and progress is now very fast. The Black Triangles are now almost done!

The event scripting has turned out to be remarkably easy. I'm sure I could do it more elegantly than I am, but what I've got is working nicely. Particularly for the tutorial levels, there are lots of events that need to take place in a specified order. One of the powers of TorqueScript is the ability to do higher-level functions with relative ease. You can generate the name of the event handler on-the-fly based upon the name of the level, like "Level_1_Pickup_Event" and make the call. CAKE!!!!

The trick with this is that it's really easy to let the architecture get away from you. I've been doing a little bit of pruning and reorganization as I go, but I've got some more serious overhauling to do in the not-to-distant future. The AI Manager, in particular, has gotten a little bit out-of-hand.

The way I've organized the progression of the early levels so far are as follows (subject to change at any time, of course):

Level 1: MILK RUN - the player learns how to rescue prisoners, shoot things, and transport large objects.

Level 2: CATTLE CANYON - Pure rescue operation, but the player must deal with static defenses - dodging attacks and blowing up non-moving targets.


Level 3: COWABUNGA - The player must deal with air threats that continually respawn, and now has to deal with "soft" time limits.

Level 4: BRIDGE OVER THE RIVER COW-AH - The player must build a bridge

Level 5: BARON COWFRED VON RICHTHOOFEN - The first "boss" level.

One of the design issues I'm struggling with (yes, even for a silly game about flying cows, one must deal with serious design issues) is keeping the player learning and developing new skills and strategies throughout the game - not just ramping up the challenge against the same handful of skills until the end of the game. This means there needs to be far more interactions with the environment (and with the AI itself) than just shooting things and dodging dangers. But I cannot complicate the control scheme with any additional buttons or commands.

The boss levels should then be a test of all you've learned in the previous few levels, hopefully combined in intriguing ways.

And of course, MORE BAD PUNS AND LIVESTOCK HUMOR!

Jay Barnson
Rampant Games
Tales of the Rampant Coyote