Game of the Week Series: Week 2 - The one where the game's not finished.

ICBM is not finished in a week! End of civilization delayed!

Sub-Zero Squirrel Games

November 16, 2016 - Little Rock, Arkansas, USA

It's been a month, not a week since I got well into the second game in our series: ICBM. 

The concept is simple. You have some rockets.They have a city. The obvious next step is to send your rockets and blow up their city. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Well, This shouldn't  too difficult to set up. We need simply a few basic ingredients:

- Gravity

- Masses

- Thrust Forces

- Colliders

Gravity is automatic in Unit once you've added a RigidBody to a GameObject. Add a Collider to a couple of objects so you can make things go boom. Hook a few keydowns to direct and add force to the rocket. Sometimes, these things don't quite go as planned. Unity requires at least one of two colliders to have a rigidbody attached in order to raise the OnCollisionEnter() event. You can also treat a collision as a trigger, without using physics. I got these fine points out of whack and created a pretty interesting result:

That's not how I intended to blow things up! Once I got everyone in the right collider/trigger, rigidbody/no physics mode, Things blew up way more nicely.

Live Dev Sessions have happened, and may continue

BTW, I've been trying something new, LiveDevSessions on Facebook Live. They might be a little boring right now. I might switch to Twitch instead, I don't know that watching somebody make a lot of typing errors and listening to the sound of the keyboard clack while staring at a whiteboard in the corner is Facebook material.  Twitch is more game oriented.

Either way, I hope these shed a little light on how we come up with and develop ideas. If nothing else, it gives me video to edit into a possible tutorial.

Why this one doesn't cut mustard...

I think this one needs to be shelved. Let's look back at the rules for this project:

1. No project should take more than a week to build. 

2. The game must have a start, a mechanic, and a win condition. 

3. The game must have enough randomness to be infinitely(ish) playable

4. The idea doesn't have to be wholly original. practice is practice 

5. Share the process of discovery with the community. 

6. Pay a bill or two?

Rules 4,5, and 6 have more to do with the process rather than the game itself. I've been sharing with you as I go here and there. The rules that came into play here are the first three, about the game itself

Rule 2 was (mostly) satisfied. You could launch missiles at a target and destroy it. A health system was created and damage was done according to proximity to the location of the blast. 

Rule 3 is for replayability, I created a system to procedurally generate target cities, so that they could grow and change as you progress. I created five tiles for each of four zones, which could be randomly applied to a city of a given diameter. 

here's a result sample:

Rule #1: This game only took a short time to get the basic mechanics down. That's not surprising seeing as how I love physics based games. However, the more I worked on this game, the more I realized that for it to have any sort of forward progression, there would have to be a lot of things added to the game:

1.  You must target ever growing cities. You should get ever better weapons to help.
1. Improving your weapons would require some sort of reward and choice system. 
1. Rewward and choice systems require some sort of ingamer economy
2. The cities should have some way of rebuilding and later even defending themselves.
1. Now the cities need some sort of A.I.

This project, before I knew it, was quickly scaling UP. I like this concept a lot, but I'd really love to see it done in 3D, with a globe style map, a whole political AI system and much much more. Then, it starts to remind me a lot of Sid Meir's Civiliation series. 

One final note: I had a hard time realizing a great UI experience for this one. Any comments you have on it would be greatly appreciated. 

This one goes on the shelf, AND itch.io

I often find myself going back to old projects and picking them back up. I'm pretty sure we'll come back to this. In the meantime, have fun destroying cities in this mini game I made out of this project.I took the last couple of days and made this a playable game. I added a quick GUI and gave it a game cycle with improvements along the way.

I stripped it down to its purest form. Three rockets against an ever growing city. Every city is random, so some are harder than others. Maybe you'll get lucky and all you get is a rural community you can take out in one, or maybe you end up striking the most heavily fortified 24 block city.

Your bomb becomes more effective as you go. For every 5000 points you earn, your blast radius increases by 50%. There is no limit to the radius or the size of the city, so this could get rather fun. I seriously doubt anyone will make to that point ever. There is no end of game scenario. You play until you can't win anymore. It's akin to beating sand with a hammer, but a little less tedious, and with explosions... and death.

You can find it here, for your Windows PC. Control are simple, space bar to burn thrusters, left and right arrows to change the pitch of the rocket. Your city awaits you on the other side of the screen, just waiting for you to bomb it to hell.

ICBM - free on Itch.io

What's next?

Part of the reason this one took so long was explained above, but also, Joe suggested another mechain to explore: prisms, and the way light behaves. I'm already well into this idea, and will try to give you more insight in my next post. In the briefest sense, light reflects, refracts, or diffracts through various mediums. There's a great study on vector math worthy of a Calc III class. Also, there's just a bunch of science that goes into this. The physicist in me loves it.

and I will name thee: "Snell's Laboratory"  

That's all for now. Until next time:

Stay Frosty,
~Sub-Zero Chuck