Remember how I posted the platformer video last week? We'd decided we were going to focus on Platformer, now, and try to get a game done. Propellor even suggests this. No more new games, just write down new ideas to go back to later (we already have about ten game ideas, most of which have been started and abandoned). We'll get the platformer going.
Then on Tuesday, "Hey let's do a shooting game that uses Twitter updates to make enemies."
Guess what we're working on now
EDIT: This is what I get for posting half-way through the day. Check after the jump for a video!
So, when Pete first discussed the idea with me, we could obviously think of a lot of cool ways to put Twitter-related things into the game. An idea I really like (but we might not use) is using the player's Twitter avatar to define how their ship looks.
First I defined some strong-shaped ships for pure red, green and blue, all based on the same number of points and having the points join up in the same way. That way they'd scale and look right with point settings halfway between.
After getting a headache trying to work out how to interpolate between the colours/shapes properly, and getting mixed up between RGB and XYZ, I managed to get a pretty good solution. Out of the R G and B values that the ship class is sent, it adds them up and then works out what fraction of the total is allocated to each colour. then it adds the same fraction of that colour to each point. Can you see why it gave me a headache?
Say it's given 0.5, 0.5 and 0.2 as the values; that adds up to 1.2.
0.5 is about 40% of 1.2; 0.2 is about 20%.
So, for each point on the new ship, it's made up of 40% of red's point, 40% of green's, and 20% of blue's. (also that's about
this colour. Blech.)
In the video, anyway, you'll see red, green, blue; then white, random, and finally the ones for mine, Prop's and P&R's twitter avatars.
Mine's a pretty clear green, but Prop's has ended up quite muddy. I might yet work out a way to boost the colour a little on dull avatars.
Tune in next week for probably another game all together!
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