Brainfold

Ok, I’m all ready to start development for today. Today I’m going to focus on gameplay and playing around with physics assisted by Chipmunk. But first I’m going to write a bit about my plans for the game.

There are two major gameplay features and one programming technique I want to emphasize. Let’s get the dull technical one out of the way first. I wrote about component-based entities back in December but never got far enough with my “main project” to get anything actually implemented. I’m going to remedy that with this game and experiment with component-based entities. It’ll be a very useful experience for future projects and hopefully some readers. But more on that later as I start implementing that stuff.

And now the interesting stuff. The feature I most liked about my old artillery game was its modular weapon system I wrote about in my memoirs. I want to create something similar, but of course better this time. Maybe I could even let the players customize their weapons, we’ll see… The other feature is not really a feature, but a kind of a fixation of mine. In addition to sci-fi, I’ve always liked “pseudorealism”. Not simulation-level realism, but I’ve always liked stories and games that are not pure fantasy. In the artillery game, this was manifested as separate kinetic and explosive damage, drag for the artillery shells and other features more complex than usual for the genre. I have also always dreamt of writing a pseudorealistic shmup (shoot’em’up), so maybe that will be my next project…

And now, back to work!

Tags: Artillery Brawl, entity system, gameplay, pymunk