Trapped Dev Update 10

Lately I’ve been working on graphical effects to determine a look for the game once and for all. While browsing the Blitz Basic forums I came along this post. It talked about metaballs and plasma-like effects. It was a post about 2 years old but someone replied to it after a long time and so it appeared in the thread list. I looked into the post and saw marvelous effects, done in a simple way, using nothing but images… I messed around with said images and my player shield code and came up with this:

This is the first screenshot of the alpha-build I am working on now. In this shot the player ship is inside his own personal space, shooting outward. The player bullets do not travel through the shield border so the player has to go ‘outside’ to hunt down aliens. So far so good. The plasma effect is flowing all the time and I can easily enlargen or shrink the shield, which is needed for this game. The effect looks great and I think it can be made much prettier once I start modifying the blob image. The effect only uses one image but I can animate the blob image or use different frames in the same plasma pool… Looks awesome. Thanks Blitz Community, esp. Angeldaniel ofcourse…

As you can see, the ship is a very simple shape. For now. The fun thing about the ship is that it changes shape when moving or when doing certain actions.

Here it’s moving and therefore closed to assure maximum safety to the pilot Using the collector will probably change the appearance of the ship again. This serves no purpose to the gameplay, other than looking cool and interesting….

You can check out the collector in the next screenshot. So far, you move it with the second analog stick. Aliens will ’stick’ to it and can then be dropped into your shield. The look of the collector is very simple as well in this screenshot. I think I will add an additional cursor-like appearance to it, but so far it’s only two rotating flares and a tail emitter. Looks neat though. If you are paying attention: In this shot the background color of the shield has changed to a dark blue… Looks cool as well and I think the shield and plasma color will change depending on the state and what’s happening to it. Visual clues are cool in shoot-em-ups.

OK, that’s it for now. I will keep tweaking the appearance of the shield and stuff over time, so don’t expect the final game to look like this (it will look much better once the final graphics are added) but it’s a nice indication to see how things are progressing.

Oh and once again I used Live Writer to write this post. It makes blogging much easier (for me anyway) as the handling and manipulation of images is soo easy in this… Great stuff. I think I will keep it