Sunday, 10 March 2013

Phase 2: Work in Progress

I'm behind with the blog at the moment, with delays caused by paid employment and illness.  There are a number of posts I have half-written, and I'll post them (backdated) in coming days.


Partial, rough level


The video below shows a partial level that I made last week.  I'm still finishing it off, but you can see the basic idea of how it works.


The important thing to note is that what you see here is not an animation, and events are not timed in any way.  It shows the game engine responding properly to events and triggers, and collisions between objects.

At the moment I'm focusing on the player controlling the game by clicking on certain objects and adjusting a setting for them, which will alter whether the contraption works or not.
  • Fan.  When the level starts, this switches on and takes a few seconds to get up to full speed, whereupon it blows the Eggle off the platform.
  • Under the record sleeve is a balloon.  This can be inflated or deflated to adjust the angle of the sleeve, changing the slope.
  • An Eggle falls onto the turntable and is forcibly ejected at an angle, depending on the turntable's speed setting.  (Eventually, this will be an imitation Fisher Price record player but I haven't built a 3D model of that yet.) 
  • The ejected Eggle knocks a hammer over, which falls onto the control panel of the Space Truk.  The player will need to program the truck to follow a specific route to hit the next trigger.
The basic idea is working well, and the problems with physics are starting to get ironed out.  I'm still having a nightmare with friction, but you can read more about that when I've published my missing posts.