The start of a sound handling system is in the source code, but I’ve decided not to implement it. I’m starting to break code while tinkering, so I think it’s time to call it a wrap and get some sleep. From version 0.6, many bugfixes of varying severity. No major gameplay changes.
Good luck to everyone still working!
-TF
And I’m all out of games. Anyone got bubblegum? 
So, since the compo ended I played and rated 172 games. Basically I started with the web games, then went through people I recognized from one or another site… then I started in on my assigned games, and when I finished those I just kinda kept rating…
If I didn’t rate your game it was because:
Some stuff I want to say:
(I pick on Flash, because I do Flash.)
I thought the over all quality of the submissions was really high! I enjoyed making my game, I enjoyed playing all yours! I’m looking forward to doing this again in August!
-TF
A few days have passed, so its time for me to write a postmortem before I forget everything I did with Invasive.
First: Thanks to everyone who played my game!
This is long, and possibly of little interest so I’ll hide it behind a read-more tag.
What went right/techniques learned…
– Hybrid blitting engine
I didn’t implement a full-redraw-each-frame blitting engine, so I’m calling it a hybrid. The main viewing area of the game consists of three “zoom” classes extending Flash’s native Sprite class, which in turn each have a terrain, flora, fauna, and artifact layer. Those layers are 500×480 transparent bitmaps to which I draw almost every frame. (The zoom class tracks a camera, and if it hasn’t been moved the terrain layer doesn’t refresh. The other layers get fed model data, and get cleared and repainted every frame.) At any given time, only one zoom class is visible, the others are .visible=false and aren’t fed model data.
Performance isn’t earth shattering, but up till now to do this project I would have added sprites to the display list for every movable object. Having a Flash display list several thousand items long just doesn’t really work well. So I was happy with this.
-Bitmaps for storing data
There are several cases in the game where I need to know if two things are in the same place. (A kiwi and a tree, a glomper and a kiwi, etc..) Since I had divorced the model from the view, I couldn’t do use either Gilbert’s bitmap collision class as I had planned , or Flash’s bitmap.hitTest[method]s. I was storing every objects locations in their own arrays. (Ie: Kiwi:Array, Glomper:Array, etc) Each object had it’s own class, but all of them had public GlobalX and GlobalY properties.) I’m sure there are faster ways of finding all intersections between two lists than a nested loop, but unfortunately I don’t know them (yet). In pseudo-code:
FOR EACH Kiwi:
FOR EACH Tree:
if the Kiwi's location == the Tree's location:
Do Stuff;
On the other hand, most of the objects weren’t colliding at any given time. So, rather than checking -every- Kiwi against -every- tree, I did the following (in pseudo-code):
PLOT EACH tree on an off screen bitmap
FOR EACH Kiwi:
Look at bitmap and see if there is a tree, IF there is a tree:
FOR EACH Tree:
IF the Kiwi's location == Tree's location:
Do Stuff;
Even though I added an if operation to the nest, and even though there’s an extra loop outside the nest (to do the plot), the second pseudo-code snippet runs faster because it cuts out a nested for loop in a large percentage of cases. Since in the cases of the Kiwi/Glomper interactions the arrays could have literally thousands of members, this made the game possible. (Though I think the second snippet is still O(n^2)? I don’t have enough of a CS background to assess that.)
I also used a bitmap for initially storing map information (to set terrain tiles during initialization). This worked beautifully vs using an xml, just in terms of my own convenience.
What went wrong:
The zoom wasn’t intuitive
I was pretty happy/comfortable with my pan and zoom, but i had written it in the first place and knew how it was going to operate. I -should- have provided mouse-wheel zoom, mouse-edge panning, etc. And the zoom levels I provided were poorly chosen; for my convenience, rather than the player’s. Several commenters noted this and they’re right.
– On the outermost level of zoom, animals should have been more than 1×1 pixel. And their colors could have been better.
It’s very hard to tell the difference between glompers and kiwis, because they’re represented at this level by single pixels– and those pixels are red and brown, two colors which don’t really show up well against the terrain. I think 2×2 pixels might have been more visible, and I could have given more thought to contrast. (Also noted by commenters)
– I spent most of my time on displaying a model, and didn’t spend time on gameplay or interface.
In the versions up to 0.6, walls stop glompers but don’t stop Kiwis. Since I cowardly shrank from the challenge of pathfinding several thousand animals at once, the movement is decided at random. As a result I was afraid there was no win condition. So at the last minute I changed it so that walls stop everything… this meant there was an easy but possibly tedious way to win, hurting the fun value of the game. I didn’t really tune things I should have, such as the number of kiwis each glomper needed to eat before reproducing. Ultimately, this comes down to me failing to test sufficiently.
Likewise, several commenters noted that it would have been nice to have click-drag to place walls (which after all, are useless if just single blocks!). They’re right.. in fact I knew this before I released it, but-
– Time management/motivation
I stopped with several hours left because I was dead tired, and probably should have tried to take a nap rather than calling it a day. The major casualty of this is a sound effects engine, but there were others.
For the present:
I had fun building the game, and I think I improved my technical skills by dealing with the movement of large numbers of objects– a task I just wouldn’t have attempted in my usual projects.
For the future:
– I’ve now done two LDs where I tried to pull off something with more complexity than I was able to do properly. Next time I’m going to try to do something small, and polish it until I gotta wear shades.
– The general setup seems ok, and I like the idea of doing a game about invasive species. I may revisit this and try to implement a better ecosystem model (along with the interface improvements), and come up with a better game. There are other projects I need to finish first though.
-TF
I was going to skip this mini-LD, I really was. But I ran into an impossible bug on my current project sooo…
I’m going to build some type of multiplayer industrial simulation. From scratch except:
– I’ll use the playerio multiplayer API
Basically I’m hoping that by being forced to quickly do a message handler from scratch, I’ll either not cause my bug (in which case I can compare the MLD game code to my main project code and fix it) or I’ll manifest the bug with more understandable symptoms because the message handler will be simpler (and then be able to compare to the project code and fix it).
(If the consensus is that this in unallowable middleware, I won’t enter the game for voting. It meets the criteria of LD16 for inclusion though (free, no NDA, I’m allowed to release my source, etc))
Regardless, watch this space for news on the development of Power Plant Operator vs Ninja! (Actually, I probably won’t do very many blog updates this time, since there’s quite a bit of work to do…)
My start time is 7:00PM Fri, AKDT (UTC -8). Current time is 9PM… Current status… the design document is done ‘enough’.
… managed to get my lobby working, and synced two clients. (The price and demand are changing in real time, though you wouldn’t know from the screenshot.)
Next up… a building selector, placement of buildings, switching between players’ power plants, a thermodynamics model (!), and sabotage. Also sprites, sounds and music. And a context sensitive menu. And help popups. And an AI that can play the game.
Yeah. The likelyhood that I’ll finish this is pretty low. But I’ll keep working and get as far as I can. Hopefully I’ll be able to duplicate the bug I’m looking for.
I was up in the air on LD19… I participated in LD15 and 17, so this was going to fit in the series. But I’m working on an entry for another competition which had a deadline of Dec 15th. That deadline got extended to the 19th, which would have conflicted. But that entry (BW16) is very close to complete, so I’ll be able to participate in the compo.
Using-
FlashDevelop/FlexSDK
GiMP
I’d plan on using sfxr, but I want to play a little more with FlashPlayer 10’s on the fly sound generation… I haven’t decided yet whether to release/declare the sound & music managers from BW16 or write new & better ones from scratch. One way or another though, this will be my first LD with sound.
I guess you didn’t leave comments for many games. Comments are always nice!
Somebody get this man a trophy!