Making headlines today

The swedish online gamingmagazine FZ has shed some light upon this blog recently. You can find the article here - written in swedish.

Thank you FZ for supporting this project!

The power of Powerups

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!

The tricky part - Graphics

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.

Working with in-game sound

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!

In case you wonder, the scriptlanguage is Lingo.

Project - PhatPong: Reloaded has begun..

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.