Slime Jumper Upgrade

Since my last post, I've been doing things here and there, some more important than others, but yesterday I put more time into improving Slime Jumper to make it more the game I intended from the start. 

So what I've changed are the spawn chances for negative items, so now its easier to lose and harder to get high scores. 

I added tar drops that come down the sides of the walls and when the player grabs one, it acts as armor and absorbs one hit with cleaning products.

There is also a 1-up life orb that will come floating from the bottom of the screen that adds a life to the player when they catch it.

When that was done I still felt like the game didn't have anything that the player was really trying to play for, there was no motivation to play even a little intelligently, you can easily survive keeping your finger pressed on the center of the screen. 

So I removed the lives, and instead now there is a vial on the side of the screen that is filled with "slime-life". A little flame under the vial burns away the players health over time and the only ways to change that is to collect garbage. So depending on the garbage, the more life is recovered.
The tar drops will make life burn away more slowly for a time, 1-ups will refill the vial and I plan on adding combos that change certain player characteristics. So for instance, 3 banana peels could give the player a slippery skin that makes cleaning products bounce off. Or 5 trash balls will make the player temporarily unaffected by cleaning products. And so on...

All-in-all I'm very much more satisfied with the way things are going now. Slime Jumper is improving, finishing up the first of two summer courses this summer. An interview at THQ this Monday!!! Things are looking good indeed. :-)

Redirection

Since my last post, I've been turning ideas over in my head about how to approach the lag and collision detection issues for my Tunnel Flyer game. None seem like they would help and I can't do more than speculate about solutions since I can't really profile the game and see where the major bottlenecks are. All these issues combined, I've decided to put that project on the back-burner. I will still keep it in mind and see if I think of some way to solve the problems, but I won't sit blankly in front of the screen trying to push something out.

That being said I will continue with learning Unity of course, and swap-out completing Tunnel Flyer with polishing and updating my two published games, Slime Jumper and Keep Running. Back to work!

It Works! Mostly...

My method for tracking the player along the tunnels in Tunnel Flyer is working! I am also able to make the player bounce off of the walls most of the time, issues arise when flying perpendicularly towards the wall, but I should be able to fix that with collision prediction. Something is causing the game to lag however. Currently I am only ever checking against two of the three tunnel segments that I am tracking, when tracking 3, the game was unplayable. Now when only tracking 2, the game is playable but the lag is noticeable. In all, I am excluding 1/3 of the tunnel segments the player is near, and excluding any triangles in the mesh that are too far away from the player. The next best thing second to only ever checking 1 tunnel segment (which seems like a bad idea) is to perhaps make the tunnels larger while keeping a similar triangle count. This way, the player will only ever be nearer to a smaller number of vertices so less computations should be required.

I will try to find a way to profile the game as it is playing to see exactly where the issues are (though I have a pretty good idea), as well as continue to make optimizations until the game is running smoothly.

On a side note, I have begun learning blender for modeling and animations. I'm not that bad though I can't say I'm all that good either, my humanoid ended up looking like someone wearing baggy overalls with an Easter Island head. So now that I know my way around the basics of blender modeling, I am going to start learning animations when I have time. Oh and I won't be using my model, I found a much nicer royalty-free one online and will continue learning with that one instead. Haha