So…

Blogging…

Let's begin!

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation…

Wait. That's not very original!

Okay, plan B!

So this is what I am currently working on:

A pixelly-ish vertical shooter for Android. I know I'm not the best at graphics, but that is something I can't really fix :/

In a previous blog, I bitched about Android's horrifyingly broken implementation of FloatBuffer, and how it pretty much crippled OpenGL ES in any situation where you needed to draw a lot of small, dynamic things AKA any sort of particle system. Long story short, I ended with a positive note that I'd found something to fix it, which was awesome.

So now I am here, and I've done a bunch more work on it. Instead of a ship just flying around shooting a few bullets at powerups, I've got a ship flying around shooting a lot of bullets, at a lot of enemies that I am using to test the level-format exporter that I wrote in python, and to test the ability to fine-control enemy spawners.

So.. seen here are two of 6 active enemies - the Wavers which obviously move in a sine motion. which move further and faster at higher levels, and the SpinLasers (I know, I'm so original with names) which spin slower and have longer lasers at higher levels. You can also see the effects of the weapon-spread powerup here, which I'll explain right below here.

So… The basics of the game are this:

* Vertical Shooter

* Space, because I can't really draw anything but spaceships

* Lots of enemies, with varying strengths, behaviours, and whatnot

* Multiple ships with different main-and-secondary weapons - stuff like beam weapons and helper-satellites and whatnot

* Powerups - oh god yes the powerups.

* Super-weapons. Can't have a good vertical shooter without super-weapons

Right now what I'm working on is the powerup system, which is pretty simple. You can upgrade your main weapon's power, it's spread, or your secondary weapon. Power is pretty much self-explanatory - more power means more damage. Spread is also somewhat self explanatory - for projectile weapons, you fire more bullets in a wider patter, for beam weapons you get a wider beam, etc.

Now, the cool bit is that the people who made the fix for the floatbuffer actually have an entire OpenGL game framework, and although I already my own complete framework, theirs has a bunch of wonderful stuff, chiefly that you can also create desktop versions, so I might check out wrapping their event triggers and loaders around my framework. It shouldn't be too difficult seeing as I'll just need to move some code from one event to another, and swap my own GLTexture with their Texture class, and wrap my SpriteSet class around their Sprite class instead of my Sprite class.

So in other words, I might be able to compile something that runs on a desktop, if I can get something to replace an accelerometer.