One Game A Month: February Halfway Status

For February, I am doing a simple shooting gallery game, similar to the ones you can find in carnivals and arcades. I am a lot further behind than I expected to be at this point in the month. I was hoping to be pretty much done with the basics and have a game ready to go, even if it looked crude. That would give me the rest of the month to do the polish and artwork.

Shooting Gallery, no frills.
Shooting Gallery, no frills.

 

As it is now, I am close to having an unpolished game, but not quite. I still need to finish the game wrapper, including the main menu and the endgame stipulations. Most of my time was spend getting the pseudo-3D implemented correctly (with a slight linear algebra refresher) and nail down some design restrictions. I have to balance what I need now, for February, and what I want to have it do for the other game that will eventually grow over this one.

One of the problems is that FlashPunk is a 2D framework, while I need to think in 3D for a few things. I may end up having to write my own moveTowards and such if I have entities move in three dimensions. I’m still figuring out how I will implement special entities–I have a factory, but it might just be a helper class. Still trying to put the pieces together in my head. I am realizing that some of the functionality I want would be better suited with a scripting language of some sort, but that is beyond a two-week deadline, I think.

Anyhow, the plan is to build a couple of hard-coded galleries and package this thing up to go, hopefully a few days early, and begin to think about March.