lobsterweb.com

The latest version of the game can be found at the bottom of this post.

Unfortunately I had to stop developing the game for a couple of weeks as I had real work to do. I’ve been doing bits and pieces here and there but nothing much until today. I’ve finally managed to get enough improvements into one place to make it worth creating and uploading another swf file of the work so far.

There’s been lots of code improvements, as usual, and a lot of major changes.

I decided having the aiming arrow move back and forth of its own accord wasn’t right for the type of gameplay I want. I want accuracy to be important and for the player’s aim to be a key contributor in completing a level. For that reason I’ve made the arrow aim according to where the mouse is on the screen. Hopefully this will make the game more fun to play. Time will tell!

The physics has been completely overhauled and collision detection improved greatly. Collisions are now detected for all points around the ball rather than just a square drawn around it (Flash’s default method). This mean that corner hits can be dealt with properly and allows the ball to roll off a corner. This method is much more processor intensive so I had to re-jig a lot of code to keep the overhead down. This has also allowed me to get rid of the “levitation bug” I had before.

I’ve included a new “death block” (guess what that does) so now lives mean something. I’m probably not going to stick with having lives. I think recording the number of attempts a player takes and letting them play until they win or give up would be better.

Finally I’ve managed to package the game so it looks a bit like a game! There’s an initial page with instructions (to be expanded later) and level selection. There’s only 5 level and it loops back to the first one if you complete them all so there’s still not much gameplay involved.

The graphics and sounds are still work in progress, they will improve for the final versions I promise!

Anyway, here’s the game - have a play around, test the collision and physics and let me know what you think.