I was too ashamed to post this in GQ, so I’ll do it here
I just finished (I hope) my awesome, wicked, can’t be beat, Flash based video game.
Now that I’m done programming it, I’d like people to play it.
Can anyone offer any suggestions on how I can turn “The Lander” into the next “All Your Base Are Belong to Us”?
I’d like to use The Lander to find myself a fulltime job. Wishful thinking? Perhaps… but as Homer J. Simpson says: “Trying is the first step toward failure.”
Oh… what’s this? You’d like to play my game? Why of course, the URL is http://lander.organa.ca
I’m curious, what sort of force law do you use for gravity? It’s not inverse square, is it? I put myself in a tight orbit around the planet with a small eccentricity and counted maybe 1.8 perigees per orbit.
Math has never been one of my strengths. The gravity code is kind of cobbled together with intuition and pure luck (terrible thing for any programmer to say:))
Its all pretty simple. I find the direction from the lander to the planet. Run that angle through Sine for Y, Cosine for X. And multiply X and Y with a number I set as gravity strength.
So:
Xgravity = cos(Angle to the Planet) * Gravity amount
Sorry, I can’t be of more help, but I didn’t use anything as complicated as … err… inverse square. I kept it to stuff I could understand.
I’ve actually been meaning to catch up with all that math I slept through in high school. Could anyone recommend a book? Complex Geometry for Dummies (or for bad programmers)
Quite fun. Of course, since one of the pure joys of gaming is creating destruction I have found that if you lift straight up for about 40 seconds in the alien bombing stage, you can do some fun things.
After going straight up, turn and put all force into going straight down. I made it with about 5 seconds to spare and managed to plow through the entire planet. That was fun.
I liked it, but found it extremely frustrating to try to judge my heading when there were no landmarks in sight. I gave up on the space probe level after continually missing the probes by the width of the ship and sailing waaaaaaay past before I could reverse course.
A couple of suggestions: would it be possible to have a ‘radar screen’ or map of the whole level, showing where you are?
Would it be possible to bounce of the planet more realistically? (That is, if you’re going clockwise and down, and bounce, end up going clockwise and up. I can produce some maths for that if you want.)
Apologies if you’ve thought of these and rejected them as ruining the game or too much bother.
Regarding the radar screen. I’ve considered making one and ended up deciding it would be wayyy too much work. (Version 2.0 feature)
Regarding the Bounce…
I put the current boucing code in as a place holder and never figured out how to fix it.
Right now, I’m making an attempt at fixing the code. I’ll let you know how it goes. I may need help… not sure right now.
Strictly in the interests of science, I have determined that to break through the planet, you need to be going full speed downward from a height of somewhere between 303,200 and 304,400.
I like it, you may want to put a function where the enter key works rather than the mouse to start the game as well as making your menu hotbar available prior to entering the game.
I like it, you may want to put a function where the enter key works rather than the mouse to start the game as well as making your menu hotbar available prior to entering the game.
