I finished Slengo. I’ve added some features to satisfy some user wishes. What is next?

Well, there are two games in the parking-lot, “Bolas” and “Casa Alto”. Both have their own technical problems. But if they’re finished, they could be fun.

Bolas is about a ship (player), which needs to push balls of the same color into eachother, in order to clear them. When all balls are cleared, the player proceeds to the next level. The technical problem with this game is that ball-to-ball collision is harder than one might think. You can find different solutions to the ball-to-ball collision problem on the internet. I have tried simple algorithms and advanced ones, but none satisfied the conditions for this game. As the video shows, the collision detection is a problem. This video is not about demonstrating the collision detection problem. The technical problem is much deeper and has larger consequences than this video demonstrates.

Casa Alto is about a character being hunted down on the ground by some sort of life-creature (ie the police). To escape, he needs to climb a building. Only climbing the building is much harder than one would think.

Casa Alto is in a very raw state. This means it actually doesn’t do anything gamy. There is no collision detection, there is no title-screen. The only thing there is, is the basic game play without threats. Still, the threats are in place. So if I figure out the collision detection part, I have a game. Points are scored by the altitude which is climbed.

Those two are work in progress. Ofcourse, I could decide to create a completely new game. At this moment, I don’t know yet. I’ll come back to this.

Yeah, you want to play it now. But you can’t. Slengo still has some issues. Anyhow, along the time goes and the issues are solved. The VorbisPlayer is such a burden on my development machine, which is a VM, that I have to test the game on iron. Anyway, below is a video of the current status. Lives are counted, but you just don’t see the count yet. But you can play levels, advance to the next and select every unlocked level there is. However, I’ve only made about 10 levels yet, so that should make some work.
See the video below for the current status:

I have made some progression since the last time I wrote an article about my new game Slengo.

 
I created a Vorbis player UserControl, optimized for sounds effects in games. When initialized, the MediaElement inside will be streaming silence. When the function Play is called with a stream, the silence will be replaced by this stream, until the end of the sound, where the stream will go back into silence mode.

This scheme solves the short-sound problem, ie MediaElement is incapable of handling sounds shorter than 1 second. The silence-stream actually makes the sound effect longer than a second. Secondly, this scheme solves a major part of the sound-latency or audio-gap. With a buffer of 45ms, this latency is drastically lower than what you get out of the box. I develop in a Virtual Machine and I’ve been really pushing to get this latency as low as possible. Then I tested on iron, which demonstrated a great latency improvement.

The only drawback of this scheme is that you cannot make major sound changes while continues playing a stream. It is not possible to alter the audio buffer length, it is not possible to switch from mono sounds to stereo sounds. Those are acceptable limits.

Past week I have added another NPC to the game. And ofcourse tested her (yes it’s a she). That currently makes a total of four NPC’s (enemies).

This weekend I took my Vorbis player to the next step: seamless audio. So you buy a couple of loop-sets, encode them to Ogg Vorbis and just mix the tracks. A MediaEnd event is triggered when a sound has finished playing, and a tracker function just injects the next track. As there is no audio-gap, the tracks play seamlessly after eachother. And at the end of the playlist, you just repeat the whole thing.

The next step was to add the tracker to the game, so that you hear the music and the sound effects at the same time.

A weird thing happened. While in my test-tracker, the background music played without a glitch, in the game the sound began to stutter and distort. I thought that the decoding routines were slow, so I thought I decode all sounds effects at the start of the game and keep the result in a cache. Only the music would then be decoded at playing time. Well, this caching scheme did not work, the music still sounded distorted. The solution was to use less VorbisPlayers for the sound effects. Apparently, there were too many MediaElements active at the same time. That’s one of those cases where it is a good thing getting to know your tools.

I’ve also worked on a title screen for the game. I’m keeping it simple this time. I also want to introduce a level picker, where a level is unlocked when you reach a certain level. That sounds easy. The hard part will be next, creating challenging levels, which keep game-players attracted.

For the fun of it, here a little video demonstrating the current features in Slengo:

The above is my testing level, so whenever I add a feature to the game, I put it into this level to test it. So it is not very strange that you see the same level over and over again in the video.

The current features. The enemies find their way through the maze, they can smash the icecubes and follow the player. There are some bonusses in the game, some for points, others to improve the player's powers. The enemy can be delayed before it hatches. The borders paralyzes the enemies touching it.

As you can see, currently there is only one enemy. I am currently working to add more enemies, however one enemy-type per level will not be feasible.

Currently I'm working on a new website design. Until now, the "style" has really been some quick work, to get it live as fast as possible. I'm not a webdesigner. I do hope that the new design will be more appealing to visitors.

I have also been working on a Silverlight game called "Slengo" (working title). Almost all the game features which I like are in it. But I still need to add some more enemies for the player to combat. This requires more graphics and AI. Having a different baddy every level is not feasible, but some diversity will hopefully add to gameplay.