Development Diary
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Got bomb explosion working (check out the screens shots page for a looksee. Had to use billboarding effects for the particles(thanks Jam Adams, Adv. animation with DX...) and they look pretty good. Need to get a better explosion bitmap but this will do for now. I'm having a little trouble with the positions of the particles but with the size they are atm they are fine, just cant change it.
I will have to improve the particle engine eventually (maybe have some effects for when bonuses are picked up or something) but I only needed a stationary explosion for this so its just basic.
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-New menu
-around 30 new textures.
-can now have different brick meshes (pyramids etc)
-md2 model format support
-thats about it...
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Made some changes to the main menu screen. I have uploaded a screen shot of it. After I uploaded it I made a couple of improvements on the menu items, i will upload a newer screenshot later. It looks a lot cleaner than the old one I thnink
I made some changes to the level editor and game code where you can select what bonus the brick will drop when its destroyed.
Im getting close to releasing another demo. I will try to make this a little more interesting and fun. Im aiming to have sound ready as well.
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I haven't updated this for a while. I added mouse input a while ago to the game. I have changed the whole main menu and added mouse input to that as well. Its a little more clean looking now but I'm not too sure if it fits the game. Its definately not going to be the final menu but I just wanted to change it.
Each object can have multiple triggers and actions now. This can allow things like making 2 bricks move to sepearate waypoints and this can be set off with one event ie when a brick gets hit etc.
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I have moving bricks working now although they will only move to one point. Still have to work out how they will continue onto the next waypoint (or previous depending on waypoint type). Also made some small changes to the level editor. Getting closer to a demo...
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I finally finished the object restructure!! Its taken me a couple of weeks(I think), when it prolly should have taken a couple of nights but you get that. It was tedious and had some motivation problems but now its done I get to code the fun stuff.
I have coded and tested 2 Triggers and 1 Action. When a few more have been implemented and I have made a few more changes to the editor, I will put a working version of the game and the level editor up for download so people can have a play around if they are interested. I wont give a time frame cos I can never seem to meet them...
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Still working on the restructure of the game objects. Im going to get the level editor working first then i will work on getting the objects working in the game. Just so you know why im doing this, previously all that the game could do is have ball, bonuses and bricks. Now just about every object in the game can affect other objects. One scenario is a level that starts off with one brick, when that brick is hit 2 others spawn, when they have been destroyed a switch spawns as well as maybe a row of bricks. If that switch is hit some traps might open up in the floor. There are a lot of other things that could happen as potentially every property of any object can be modified by these 'Triggers'.
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Have decided to do a huge redesign/restructure of the games objects. Hopefully should have everything back to normal with the new structure tomorrow. This will allow all the games objects to have similar properties (ie bricks could move and have physics properties if I wanted).
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Last night I totally redid the main menu screen. It looks heaps better now, at the very least colorfull ;) The selected menu item shrinks and grows while selected. I might speed this up yet. I am hoping to be able to put a demo on the site this weekend, but I have a bad habit of being way off in my ETA estimates...
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Played around with alpha blending for a while today and finally found a good blending mode for the bricks. Had to update the editor for this and change the game rendering process for it to look right but wasn't too much work. Will try to get shadows looking better than a crusty smudge tomorrow.
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