August Game: now with planes

So, I haven't posted here in a while. I've found this one game a month thing can take a lot out of a guy, especially when I find a game I like, and then I'll potentially burn out in that month. In months past, I've felt OK with taking a light game design to help recharge my batteries.

I thought that I was doing that this month, but maybe I ended up needing to go even lighter - I didn't finish anywhere near as much as I wanted to (it's summertime, other distractions showed up). Even so, there are elements that I really like in what I'm calling my August game. I've still got 15 hours of August, so it's not really done. And, if I held myself to the rules of the One Game A Month website, there's a little bit of leeway (96 hours! Luxury!) after the end of the month to squeak in. So, maybe I'll address some of the issues I have with the game.

Things that work:

• Mouse steering arcade flight mechanics - I intended to do a full on flight sim flight model, but that was too much work. So, mouse up points your nose down, mouse left banks left. Simple.
• Fullscreen - This makes a difference.
• Quaternions, rather than a single heading angle - this took a lot of work, but it's largely working.
• Simpler AI - I ripped out a lot of special-case AI, and the enemy planes feel about as good as before, perhaps largely due to the smooth steering.
• Collisions deal damage - important when you're near the ground.

Things that need improvement:

• The name of the game is "Blimp Patrol", or some such, and there aren't any blimps in the game yet.
• Leftover art: title screen
• Leftover art: tank damage display
• The AI isn't great about avoiding collisions
• The AI doesn't really take 3d into account, at all
• The radar display should be based on 2d positions, but when you bank, the display becomes squished. This makes sense, but is weird.
• Controls (player and AI) cause an immediate effect in plane orientation - you can bank from full left to full right in a single frame. That's not realistic. This isn't a game about realism, but still.
• Code cleanup: there's a bunch of stuff carried forward from several games ago - including code that isn't even being used. Also, the plane logic is in a file called "tank.js".
• The whole world is comically small. Distances were built for the tank game, and I simply reused them, even with faster moving objects.

I thought that going from 2d to 3d gameplay was going to be relatively easy, but there's a lot to think about there. In the end, I backed off a lot from most of that, just to get the game minimally playable by the end of the month. I'd still like to do a full flight sim with six degrees of freedom and a somewhat realistic aerodynamic model, but that's not this month's project, and probably not anything in 2013.

All that said, here's a URL:

http://bigdicegames.com/Blimps/blimps.html

And now, I'm going outside for some fresh air.