In the latest months I've not been able to login here due to a lost account, after some research it's now retrieved once again, I'm truly sorry for the inconvenience.Lately I've had lots of other work to accomplish, so the time has been short - as always. But now things are looking clearer, I recently met a skillful 3d-programmer who has found the project interesting, and we will bring it up to a new dimension together. The foundation for the game is already there, so now it's up to us to bring it to life. All of you who has signed up as betatesters of this project will be notified later. Stay tuned for further updates here. The PhatPong: Reloaded project is still running!
Right now I'm working on the singleplayermode and how it's supposed to work. Hopefully you'll see 15 to 20 locations where you can meet your current rival in a fight towards the goal to become the grand champion. You'll be rewarded for every game you complete somehow, either you'll get bonuses or special items or you'll unlock events. Probably I'll let the singleplayer decide how much you can do in multiplayer, so you have to complete the singleplayergame before you can do everything in multiplayer.
The next time I'll cover some of how the AI works, it will be quite remarkable for a pongclone. ;)
The one thing that has been requested among enthusiasts is powerups, the one thing I never thought of for PhatPong 05. Powerups in PhatPong: Reloaded will give the player ability to change the gameplay to her advantage. Once you're in control of the ball and run over one of these, you'll be able to surprise your opponent with f.i. a "repelling magnetic shock", sudden slowmotion or a sticky bracket.
This is just the beginning, I'm aiming at 10 (give or take) of these at release, all with different ability to change the overall gameplay. If you have any suggestions to a powerup you might think would be fun, drop a comment!
Alongside creating the music and soundeffects I continue the exploration of in-game graphics. The hard part is not to merely create them and get it interactive, the nut is to create a fully working theme which is easy to navigate through and also efficient on consuming CPU on the end-users computer, of course neat eyecandy is also a plus.
PhatPong: Reloaded will have different environments depending on where you are in the gameworld, so a simple backdrop will not do - I am aiming at 10 to 20 different levels with about 5 different gamemodes at release, after that things will just expand via the automatic updater.
The one thing that is really comfortable when working on a project alone is that you decide which workingtask is coming up next. The core isn't yet fully completed with code and its graphics, allthough I've decided to start the soundcreation - mostly to try to develop everything alongside each element. (Of course there are many downsides with developing alone, especially the social contact and the time every single thing takes.)
At the moment I'm trying to build the themesong so it comes as closely as it gets to the overall game-experience, this isn't easy - especially when I don't have the actual foundation (that might be why you should build the game first and add music and soundeffects to it later..) - but, hopefully I can let the sound decide some of the events that you'll see and not the other way around.
The sound - from my point of view - is equally important to the graphics, the sound makes you feel the bounce of the ball and that dustcloud you just created with a hard hit in the wall. Therefore I have set up a little script which will randomize the characteristics of the sound. Every simple sound (like when your mouse roll over a menuitem) has five different recorded characteristics, and when adding the simple script looking a bit like this:
on channelRotate if availableChannel <> 7 then availableChannel = availableChannel + 1 else availableChannel = 1 end if rSound = random(5) case rSound of 1: soundStartTime = 0 soundEndTime = 500 2: soundStartTime = 500 soundEndTime = 1000 3: soundStartTime = 1000 soundEndTime = 1500 4: soundStartTime = 1500 soundEndTime = 2000 5: soundStartTime = 2000 soundEndTime = 2500 end case pNote = +random(3) -random(3)end end
--Calling the sound from elsewhere channelRotate sendSound = "ppr_mouseOver" sound(availableChannel).queue([#member: member(sendSound), #startTime: soundStartTime, #endTime: soundEndTime, #rateShift: pNote])
the sound will automatically rotate in the available channels and get 25 (5x5) different characteristics, so.. solong repetitive sound!
Well, actually it began a few weeks ago, but I recently decided to blog the news, so anyone who is interested in the development can take part of it here.
PhatPong: Reloaded is a sequel to the game PhatPong 05 which can be found here The development of PP05 stopped sadly because lack of time. But now I'm on my feet again to create an astonishing pongclone with lots of gadgets, explosions and destructive environment.
If you have any suggestions or opinions of the material I will post further on, please post a comment. This will also help me to hopefully bring you an even better game in the end.
Finally an update here!
