Week 11

So we've changed up the hunting game even more now.  I'd document the whole process with pictures, but I'm lazy.  It changed pretty dramatically though, we went from a Galaga clone, to a weird off skewed to the left board where you had to aim your shots at static targets based on some under the hood trig functions I came up with (it was really just tangent).  Then we decided to let the enemies move, but you only get one shot at maximizing your score, that coupled with the new angle aiming mechanic meant your best bet was to just spam the buffalo over and over since he was worth the most points.  So now we have them run forever, made the buffalo a little faster and you only get 20 arrows.  It's pretty too, if you adjust your aiming angle far enough it almost looks like the archer snaps his spine.

We also changed up the overworld quite a bit, but most of that was all talk and no implementation.  We went from a CastleVille style world to some other stuff to finally just a simple world to tie the mini games together that is fun to explore.  I'm not sure how fun it is to really wander yet since we just barely got the final art, but it should be good.

The bear fight on the other had hasn't gotten very far in terms of iteration.  At first you could just attack if you go in range and then I added a jump that does little.  Ideally I'd like to make it so a jump attack does more damage and jumping is a way to dodge an attack.  Still though, its a very basic fighting game.  I'm not really sure how to do better AI right now and a few week prototype is not a great time to learn something complicated like that.  I might add a Hadouken style move if I have time, but I don't think I will.

Overall, I think it came together rather well.  With enough mini games and a big enough world it'd probably be a fun game to mess around with.

HTML5 on the other hand doesn't even remotely live up to the hype.  It's pretty cool for web design I suppose, but it doesn't seem that different than HTML4.  As far as game development goes though it seems incredibly hamfisted.  Like someone at W3 was just like, oh, if we do this we could probably make games that run in the browser.  Then everyone immediately dropped their jaws to the floor and figured out how to shitrig it all together.  There also seems to be a billion ways to build a game with it, every team appears to have picked a different framework or library.  Hell, I even experimented with more than one.  We ended up settling on just basic CSS and manipulation with JQuery.  It's gross and I hate it.  Also, it seems kinda slow, but for our purposes it does not matter.