Rocket Bear Games Blog

Welcome to the first Rrrrocket Report!  I’ve decided to make weekly blog posts about Infested Planet and what I’ve been up to.

This week I added a couple of cool things to the game.  I’ve always wanted to start of the game with a bang.  At the same time, the first few levels should teach the player basics.  Until now I didn’t have a very good way to do both.

Well, I’ve just revamped Mission 1 with new shiny LUA code.

The player now has AI teammates that the level script controls.  This allows me to amp up the difficulty on Mission 1 to ridiculous amounts.  I jacked up the alien counts to fill the whole level with swarms.  That’s ok, since the AI is there to take care of the difficult stuff.

The player still has to capture 3 hive points, but now AI teammates will run up and help you when you attack.  Personally, I love this mission now.  It shows off what Infested Planet is all about right from the start.  I’m sure that I’ll still need to tweak it, but it’s about 1029.5% better.  I wonder how testers will like it?

The other big thing that I threw in this week was new audio code.  Matthew – my personal audio guru – asked for a couple of tricky bits of code to adjust how the sound volume is tweaked.

• For example, if a sound is played over and over again, we might want to reduce the volume of the effect after a while – if a giant siege cannon is firing we don’t want everything to be drowned in noise forever.
• The other audio bit was muffling sounds that happen outside of the camera view.  In theory it shouldn’t matter, but this is a 2D game and it feels weird to hear loud sounds coming off-screen.  After my code tweak, sounds get muted if they’re far away from the player’s view.

Besides the things above, I did some code housecleaning – the way the game decided if two objects were hostile to each other was a mess.  After my tidying up I can now have more than 2 teams (in theory).  Maybe I’ll use it for some of the later missions.

That’s it for Rocket Report #1.  Next week I’ll be working on more of the campaign missions.  I have a notebook full of mission ideas and I’m not afraid to use it. =)  Look here next Friday for RR #2.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 11th, 2013 at 7:45 pm and is filed under Infested Planet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.