01.10
After the pirate game for Free Realms, we moved on to a Star Wars IP. The game was called Attack Cruiser, for the MMO Clone Wars Adventure. Specifically this cruiser game was to resemble a top view twin-stick shooter, like geometry wars, but also with formations of ships like galaga. This game was co-op and had modes where you raced to finish as soon as possible, or tried to avoid death, or score as many points as possible.
The main gameplay involves flying an attack cruiser around, and enemy ships have elaborate AI to charge towards the player, or travel on a predetermined path, maybe decide to leave, spawn more ships, or stay at a certain range. It is also 3D as the little ships will fly above or below you instead of crashing into the side of you.
Uniquely on this game, I had a lot of fun with bezier curves. We had many things moving on snake-lines.
Keeping ships in formation is extremely hard though! Flocking algorithms they call it. You could launch your own fighters which were allies and attacked things intelligently on their path. They actually did heavy damage and were great for blowing up the massive ships.
Working with one other programmer, we made very powerful design tools to allow a base of 10 or 20 ships turn into hundreds of variations for types of weapons fired, physical movements, difficulty for damage and armor, and also huge flexibility for AI. It was the first time I thought of a designers tool as actually programming tool instead of simple changing of numbers. Using conditional statements to change AI, launch more ships, and end the game in a tool with user interface for designers certainly lightened the load for the programmers.
The edge of the map being a ‘soft edge’ and forcing a warp out, and warp back in, was kinda fun to rig up. We used animations quite heavily. The death animations were interesting too, which parts of the ship crumbling and different camera angles used. The beginning scene has all the ships fly by the camera but the players in the videos below just skip past them sadly.
Other things you probably can’t see, the turrets on the gun actually spin toward your cursor. As you fly toward the top of the screen you will curve around the planet. Flying down you can see a more top view, flying up you see more of the side. The scoring system has complex logorithmic scale and is based on how quickly score is achieved combined with how little damage is taken, to avoid all the bullets will give a larger points multiplier.
