Game updated: Asteroids

After a lot of rewriting and optimizing code for Flippuzzle I felt like I needed to look at something else to keep my mind a bit sane, so I did a revisit to my Asteroids game. Since I spent the last three days optimizing rendering code, that's just what I continued doing with Asteroids.

The main bottleneck was the smoke rendering, but with some nice special case code to stiffen up the entity-management and smaller smoke textures I managed to double the framerate and make it much less CPU-hungry.

Play it at pjio.com.

Introducing: Flippuzzle

A while ago I posted a screenshot from my current project with a promise to give more info about it. So, here we go!

The game is called Flippuzzle, and is a 3-dimensional puzzle game. All levels will be based on photographs taken in Greenland. I had two reasons for choosing Greenland,
1. the nature over there is simply amazing
2. I came across a lot of really nice photos for a really nice price

Above you can see an actual ingame screenshot. The gameplay is controlled with mouse only and the goal is to get all pieces to their right position, just like with a regular jigsaw-puzzle. What differs this puzzle from regular jigsaw ones is that the pieces are linked with their neighbors and rotates with them. It sounds complicated, but it's quite logical once you get the grip of it.

The game is starting to feel quite finished now. What's left to do is:

• Add more levels. At the moment I've got 25 but I'd like it to be somewhere around 40
• Add music. The code for loading and playing the music is almost done, but I need to find and select some nice tunes that match the game. This is tricky.
• Fix the menus and instructions, the menus is really unsatisfying in the current build, and the instructions simply doesn't exist.
• Polish.
  

I'm hoping to get finished with the game sometime this summer, but you never know, when I started the project it was supposed to take about one moth. That's over two years ago today..

Frets on Fire

The game to play at the moment (besides my versions of Snake and Asteroids) is without any doubt Frets on Fire.



Fun, innovative and open source. There are some stability issues, but it's still a great game. If you haven't tried it yet, then you know what to do..