A New High Score!

No, I don't keep track of high scores. But I am keeping track of score within a mission, that's something. But, as Clive Anderson liked to say, the points don't matter. However, let's take a tour of what you would see if you went here: http://bigdicegames.com/BZone/bzone.html

(I'm not saying you can't go there - maybe you'd like to. Who am I to judge?)

So, the new stuff:

• Cutscenes - in between locations, the tanks take a little bit of time driving away. Opportunity to remind the player the name of the game, in case somebody walked in. And, if the 2.35:1 aspect ratio of the normal game isn't wide enough, the cutscene letterbox makes it even better. I haven't calculated it, but it's gotta be almost as good as Cinerama. (Look it up!)
• Message Scroll - if you look above the radar display up top, you'll see some of that pointy font that you love so much. I did a little bit of research, and I might write my own TTF tool, because, hey, tools. But not for this game. So we're stuck with a font made up of pretty much connecting (-1, 0, 1) (-1, 0, 1). Pretty much. It's legible, and the 8s don't look exactly like the Bs, and that's enough. Messages come in, and they show up onscreen, and after a while, they fade out. Most of that is just a simple animation of color from white to green to transparent. I like it.
• Target Lock - not exactly what I had in mind to begin with, but if you hit "T", the tank in front of you can be selected as a target. Locking on would be super handy if there were missiles in the game, but there aren't. I display range and angle to the locked target. Which would be handy, maybe, if there was artillery in the game. But, again, not. However...
• Buddy Commands - I think this was just about the last feature that I wanted to get in, and here it is. If you target a tank, and then you hit the '1' key, your buddy will try to go and attack that tank. If there are tanks in the way, that might not happen. If you're in the way, your buddy will try to drive around, but good pathfinding never got in, so it might be a while until your buddy finds his way around the immovable object.
• [1] Attack My Target - as I was describing above; specifies a designated target. This bypasses the buddy's detection radius, which makes the buddy vaguely useful - you can identify a target, send your buddy at it, and tend to tougher foes, and your buddy may have taken care of things.
• [2] Follow me - sometimes your buddy gets far away and you're worried about his safety. This will get him to try to be close to you. Which can be maddening.
• [3] Patrol - this is the default state, but you have a button to send your buddy out on patrol if you change your mind about some order you've sent.
• [4] Run away! - sometimes, attacking isn't the right idea. In this mode, the buddy will identify the closest enemy, and try to get away. This isn't super smart, and it is confined to his detection radius, which is still pretty small. But you can see him in trouble, and tell him to flee. Unlike the other modes, this one will override the tank's desire to shoot at what's nearby.
• Score Display - I touched on this already. Score upper left. You get points for shooting tanks. You don't get points for tanks your buddy kills. You lose points if your buddy dies.
• End of Mission Score / Press Space - feel free to insert another quarter to play the next game. If I can figure out an easy way to have a $0.25 PayPal link on that page, it'd be fun.
• Locations position tanks - in the description of each mission, there's a position for the player tank and the buddy tank. I actually use these now, rather than having the players pick up from where the cutscene left them.

My "TODO" list is getting short (which is good, as the amount of July remaining is getting slim). Part of it is that I've been finishing stuff faster than I've been adding new stuff. I've also been moving some stuff into the "maybe later" category. Not a lot, though.

• location bonus timer - If you clear out a location quickly, you deserve a bonus. Kind of like playing "Donkey Kong".
• weather effects - I may jam this in at the very end, depending on how excited I am. It'd be nice to have rain and snow. They'll have to be positioned in the world, so that when you drive through them, they move relative to the tank, and turn... Whew, I don't know if I'll get to them... that's going to be a lot of tuning to make them look right.
• location objects - that big red box in the center of the world... that should be positioned based on location data. There's actual data in the location data that specifies box positions, which I'm ignoring
• game over scoring - You can win a game and then lose the game, if the bullets cross in the air. I've done it. Maybe that's OK to leave in. But, while you're watching the Game Over screen, you can actually see your score change if your buddy tank gets into a fight and loses. That feels wrong.

Oh, one other note - if you look at the "Game Over" text, you may notice there's a drop shadow, now. In fact, there's always been a drop shadow, but the tutorial I was reading about rendering transparent stuff had me using glBlend(1, 1-srcAlpha), which I think sounded a little weird to me. Blending is tricky, there are a few blend modes that make a lot of sense, and a lot of modes that make no sense at all. I was noticing that pieces of textures that were supposed to be opaque, in fact, were somewhat transparent, which led me to use glBlend(srcAlpha, 1-srcAlpha), which got me to what I was trying to accomplish all along. And, once I got the transparency sorted out (ha!), the drop shadow that was there all along started showing up. I don't have a good explanation for what those words are casting a shadow on, maybe the words are on a pane of glass, and the shadow's on another pane of glass... which makes me think I ought to stick lens flare into this game.

Actually, I should figure out a way to make a blimp game. I was thinking during the first half of the year that a blimp game would be good (because how could it not?), but I was sticking to 2d games, and blimps are problematic in 2d. But now the sky is the... sorry. Now, it's really easy to do big objects like blimps. So, maybe that's August.