Game Dev Engine #7. Mouse Pointer.

2023-07-19. Showcasing mouse control via pointing and multi-button clicking. The mouse has many methods of providing input, so I will be making a few small games to showcase the various methods. The windowing system is already showcasing click & drag, but I figure showing it within a game actually shows its use in a game development / usability setting. The windows are part of the engine, where as a sample game should have easily consumable mouse input relative to the game itself (in this case, the game lives inside of a window, and doesn't care about the higher level OS-style functionality).
My game of choice is a clone of Missile Command, which I have never played, so this doesn't capture all of the example enemy types -- particularly the enemy that drops bombs, and the smart targeting missile that avoids explosions. But I did add the following features:
- cities and silos are procedurally generated
- cities act as missile generators at level end
- you obtain one new city and one new silo at level end, or bonus points if none needed
- silos have no 10 missile limit, so don't waste early
- missiles can split into 3, and can do so multiple times
- difficulty ramp up includes: more missiles, more splits, faster missiles
- middle silo fires faster missiles
- explosions cause chain reactions, which can help efficiency
- terrain is procedurally generated, but I don't change it, as I want to keep the sense that you're in the same country / county of cities each level
- end of level: cities and silos produce more missiles
The lines are draw by the GPU as a "sprite", thus some floating point inaccuracies cause flickering. I had considered rendering this as a single (not double) buffered bitmap screen, like the original arcades (e.g. Missile Command, Defender, Robotron: 2084), which this engine allows. But there is no natural palette indexing, and I didn't want to complicate things with pixel shaders to replicate the palette cycling. I may try this for a Defender clone though.
Finally, this game offers an interesting challenge for Gamepad based input. Some great ideas to follow. If you can make this fun with a game controller -- then I think that's a huge win. It would open the floor to couch co-op multi-player.
Hope you enjoy!
Playlists:
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- Xona System 8: • Game Dev Engine #1. A ...
- Voxel: • Voxel Engine #8 - Corr...
- Ray Cast: • 3D Ray Casting Engine:...
- Graph-All: • #1 Graph-All Equation ...
- Scroll Shmup: • The First Pixel: Devlo...
- Road: • Pseudo 3D Road #8 - in...
- Arena Shmup: • Arena Shmup Demo #3 - ...
- Wave Function: • A.I. Texture Generatio...
- 3D Polygon: • 3D Polygon Engine #9 -...
- GW-BASIC: • GW-BASIC - Escape From...
Websites:
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- GitHub: github.com/JDo...
- Blog: thefirstpixel.com
- Studio: xona.com

[@adrikriptok7225]

This looks so cool!!

[@JDoucette]

Thank you! :)