This sprint marks the last addition of Micro-Games, which should bring the total amount to twenty-five. In particular, I created three new games, utilizing a mix of tools and features created over the past few months. Ideally, moving forward, the rest of the project will focus on adjusting the gameplay of the Micro-Games, implementing art / sound, and providing general polish. This should also give a weeks to test all functionality after this sprint.
Planet Strike is a simple Micro-Game that tasks the player to fire missiles at a planet and destroy enemy bases. The missile spawn location is set, and the adjacent planet is undergoing a constant rotation with a number of enemy builds positioned on the outer edge. The player must time the press of a launch button in order to ensure that the missile explosion radius hits nearby buildings after colliding with the planet.
While most of the mechanics were simple, there were some complications relating to the rotation aspects and ActionScript. This primarily relates to noting the process of converting between local and world space when managing display objects attached within a hierarchy. The enemy bases and explosions ultimately attach to the Planet, so in both cases the planet's rotation needs to be accounted to figure out where the position the display objects relative to the planet's center. Overall, this wasn't exactly a hurdle, but did require some tangent analysis to properly convert between the missiles world space to the planet's surface.
The Phone Call game presents the player with number buttons typically found within a keypad. The keypad begins inactive, and the player must watch the button presses and memorize the order. Once a round of numbers is conveyed, the entire keypad highlights and allows the player to input the correct sequence. This repeats for three rounds, and the player wins if they are able to successfully pass all rounds.
As a typical phone number has the following sequence: 3-3-4. The gameplay system is design to effectively run through a vector containing the random groupings of numbers for each round. Therefore, the game can easily adapt to any amount of rounds or numbers within a round. A state flow allows for the round to begin by cycling through each possible number, lighting it up briefly, and moving to the next within a brief time step in between. After this, the state moves to the input phase, waiting for the user to submit the required amount of numbers for the round. After a validation check, the user passed or failed, and on pass the game continues through rounds until all rounds have been won.
The Follower game was extremely simple to make, as it primarily involved utilizing similar gyroscope mechanics within previous Micro-Games. The only real gameplay involved creating a system to spawn followers to collect. A base follower is created at the start, and this one, when collected, will tell the spawn system to then create another follower with the same traits. Aside from this, after every X seconds, another type of follower is spawned. This follower, when collected, will not allow for the spawning of other followers.
The idea is to provide the player with a primary follower chain to collect, but also provide the occasional random spawning of a follower to ensure gameplay is a bit more dynamic. As an additional visual feature, I also allowed the followers to chase the player in a chain when collected. Based from the player's last position, each follower is then positioned based on the next follower's last position, direction, and a default offset. This creates a snake-like chain that loops as the player moves around the screen.
With the bulk of the Micro-Game development completed, the next few sprints will focus mostly on polish work. It is likely that the next sprint will involve implementing all of the achievements, which shouldn't take too long, since most of the data is relatively simple to track. Sound, as well as art, may also need some adjustments within the games, but most of it involves simply swapping out placeholder items.