Tuesday, July 03, 2007

Plans have changed

First off, the creator of the Three Hundred Ideas page has given up. I'm not gonna launch into a discussion of whether this is good or bad here, and would ask you not to do so in the comments. That's not what this blog or even this blog post is about. It's his choice.

He mentioned in his final post that he was going to start implementing his ideas, so I'm going to leave them to him. Instead, I'm going to be going back to one of my older, more potential-wasting projects: Vertical.

I'm going to make it a game this time. Not a toy, or an exercise in meditation, but a full game. The general format will be closed stages containing a number of Targets that the player needs to hit with his character. The faster, the better - the game will keep time records, but I don't think there'll be a time limit. Those are just annoying.

To spice things up, I'm going to add several new obstacles, including ways to actually die. The current planned list includes:
-Tiles that kill you upon contact (Spikes, probably)
-Tiles that the grapple bounces off of without sticking to
-Tiles that the player can freely pass through, but the grapple sticks to like a wall
-Tiles that block the player like a wall, but the grapple can freely pass through
-Moving tiles (possibly including all of the above types)
-Laser beams
-Color-coded buttons to activate/deactivate laser beams

I'n not convinced that there should be enemies, because I don't want to give the player a weapon.

Curently I've modified the Vertical code to pull level data from a file, but that's it. Expect updates forthcoming!

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