test_bullets 7/1 test_bullets-- I had only ever worked on one other Director game before in my life, The (Great) Mower Maniac, and in that game, the player could only move left or right. In this game, we wanted the user to move left, right, up, and down, and be able to shoot in any direction. I spend all afternoon one day trying to figure out all of the code to accomplish this, about 6pm this was my product. I put v0.001 on the bottom of the project for kicks. The thing I really like about this demo, is that it was absolutely never intended to be shown to the public, so you can actually hide the white object off the side of the stage. I thought it was a cool feature, but I think everyone else thought it was quite confusing. Instructions: To move the white blob, use the arrow keys, holding them down in the direction you wish to travel. Hold down the space bar to fire. I believe this was the only demo that was a full 30 frames per second, all the ones that followed were 24 frames per second so they wouldn't slow down too much on less-fast computers. test_bullets2.dir 7/1 test_bullets2-- A few hours after test_bullets, I implemented the chemotherapy bar timer. Obviously, it's not nearly as beautiful as in the public betas, but it worked just like it was supposed to work. This is when we decided to have the chemo decrease faster for every bullet, to add a little extra fun to the game. When your chemo runs out, you go to the "Outta Ammo" screen, and can restart from the beginning. This began our drive to make the game as addictive as possible, by encouraging the player to have the option to play again immediately. I changed the version number for fun to v0.002, which really just meant, I thought it was twice as good as the first one, so it was a huge improvement. side_scroll.dir 7/2/03 side_scroll--One of the things that made Super Mario Bros. so much better than PacMan was the side-scroll action of the game. I had absolutely no idea how to program this, and it was never really mentioned in any of my programming books. I consulted my good friend Halim, who is a master innovator. He said to me, something like this, "Dave, you just need to subtract this from that and add that and something like that and just figure it out I'm pretty sure it works." A half hour later, I coded it exactly as he said, and this was the demo of this great accomplishment. It had now occurred to me that all of the time Halim had spent playing Grand Theft Auto really was paying off. side_scroll2.dir 7/2/03 side_scroll2--Okay, so getting the ball to scroll on the screen was pretty neat, but still, that didn't explain how to get all the AI (artifical intelligence) enemies to "look" like they were scrolling, too. So I spend an hour looking over the calculations Halim gave me, and wrote a short up-down and left-right AI script. The key was something I called hDiff, it's pretty much the "Flux Capacitor" (sp?) of low-end side-scroll games. hDiff was implemented in all future builds on the game. I think I sat and side-scrolled back and forth on this game for an hour or two before I moved on. I was very proud of getting this done in thirty minutes, because I had expected to spend two days on it. I bought Halim a pizza. side_scroll3.dir 7/4/03 side_scroll3--I added more enemies to the game and tested it on several different types of computers. We ran this demo on as slow as a Pentium 300Mhz and G3/400, and on as fast as an Althon XP 2100+ and G4/867. It worked fine on all platforms, so we had established that the game was indeed feasible for computers from all walks of "life." side_scrollwithCC.dir 7/8/03 side_scrollwithCC--Instead of using silly blocks and circles, this was the first demo to include an actual "cancer cell." This is the only demo that every contained the growing T-cell, which was artistically beautiful, but scientifically the worst thing you could show a cancer patient. (Hey, look at the cancer grow on the screen! Oh! Wow! It just ate the T-Cell. Hmm. [Note: Sarcasm]) Almost future versions had one size cancer cells, so as not to discourage any patient who may decide to play the game. The goal was, cancer was already there, so let's kick it's ass. test_SuperBullets.dir 7/8/03 test_SuperBullets--I went back and added a visually-enhanced bullet Yuko designed, what we called the "Super Bullet." This was the point when I knew working with Yuko was going to take me further than any of my expectations. We had one month left, and I was already psyched at the first inclusion of her graphics into the game besides the "cancer cell." test_SuperBullets2.dir 7/8/03 test_superBullets2--We placed the T-Cell as the main character in the game later that evening, and ensured the bullets fired from where there were supposed to fire from. (In early versions, the bullets came off the top of side, in this version, the bullets were in the exact center.) For those of you programmers and project managers, obviously you'll notice this says 0.0015, while it was built after version 0.002. That's because this version was an improvement on the 0.001 build, and had nothing to do with 0.002. Obviously, the two builds would have to be merged very shortly. side_scrollwithCCwithSuperBullets.dir 7/10/03 side_scrollwithCCwithSuperBullets--This was the first build of the game that actually allowed the "cancer cell" to be destroyed by a bullet. It wasn't glorious, it wasn't pretty, but the code behind it was perfect. This demo concluded virtually all of our necessary feature set, so we began working on builds that integrated all features to date. side_scroll_baseJul14 7/14 side_scroll_baseJul14--I added a score and a "mini-map" to the game, and included the chemo bar feature from earlier versions. I also added level support, so that the final version of the game could include as many levels as possible. Once you finish the first level, you move onto the second level. We left out the "start over" button so that I'd actually get work done. (When I made builds with "start over" buttons, I'd play them over and over again for 20 to 30 minutes straight, and Yuko would love over at me and say, "Why do you keep playing??? You should be programming!!!") This is when I knew the game has potential to be addictive. That was very satisfying. side_scroll_baseJul15_4pm 7/15 side_scroll_baseJul15_4pm--The next day we implemented the chemo bag to pick up to "refill" the chemo bar, and we implemented the G-CSF super shot, which would put the T-Cell into "super/invisible" mode. In super mode, the T-cell shoots faster, bigger bullets, and doesn't get hurt at all when bumped into. The G-CSF shot in this version was one of my largest artistic contributions to this game (see, it earned me 'secondary artist' status...) but it was obviously cut when Yuko made the real G-CSF shot. side_scroll_baseJul16 side_scroll_baseJul16--This was the final version posted on the web site as a demo before we went into our "quiet period" as Yuko's artwork became more and more magnificent. We fixed a few small bugs from the day before, and I created some new bugs in the process of fixing the old bugs, but this was the demo that proved our concept successful. We did about 15 more revisions after this demo before public beta 1 was released on August 22nd.
The final release will be known as version 1.0 |