Work in Progress: Planetos

Being stuck on some other work, I do what I always do, start a new game. So far, it is going very well. The game is based on the old “Crazy Comets” game on the C64. Below is a movie clip of the current status of this game.

I spend quite some time to get smooth transitions between the title screen to the game screen, and between levels. It appears that under heavy FPS, the Vorbisplayer performs best with music which is encoded at 16 Kpbs.

The only things this game still lacks are: highscores, a comet, a game-over and game-completed state and some other details. The logo was made by converting an image to vector graphics with Inkscape. The star screen and all explosions are done with a particle system engine. Also spend quite some work on getting good performance with these particle systems. All graphics are “downgraded” with Photoshop’s Mosaïc filter, to get a real 8-bit feeling about it. And you don’t want to know the work which was done for the level editor.

Well, up till now, I like how it looks. I might tweak the planet movement parameters a bit to make the game a little easier. The pink “planet” (which is really Jupiter’s moon Europa), is perhaps a little too hard for the player, especially when it gets angry.