So I have been super busy for a long time and I haven’t really made anything in at least 8 months. With LudumDare 27 coming up. I thought I would do a little warm up game and spend a little bit of time ( less than 20 hours total) on learning a variety of things that I could potentially find useful in the LD, in also as a way to ‘complete’ an actual small mini project. My goal was to aim incredibly low and just explore new libraries/frameworks/etc…
So I made Escape Copter 4.0 !
It maxes out difficulty around 800 meters, on an off chance there is a couple of ‘scenarios’ that it was unbeatable by me, though it doesn’t happen often and also doesn’t mean that someone else couldn’t get through it.
Since this was a project was meant for me to learn and not necessarily for full fun potential or ‘full polished/diversity’. Here is what I learned and utilized!
- Self imposed restriction: Use 1 color(#FD2850) + black/white
- Self imposed restriction: Use 1 button control (You can use space bar or up arrow)
- Utilized Box2D for a lot, including gravity, movement, collisions, item pickup, sensors, maskbits and category bits! ( I learned a lot!)
- Utilized ParticleEffect and the associated Particle Editor with libgdx
- also pseudo implemented a custom particle thingamajinger for 1 aspect of it.
- Utilized 2 cameras and a libgdx stage all at once. 1 camera for game, 1 camera for ‘transition effects’ and stage handles labels/buttons
- Utilized Simplex noise for background parallax scrolling
- Utilized Universal Tween Engine for intro effect and transition
- Learned for the first time ever, how to apply ShaderEffects and ShaderProgram and applied a ‘blur’ to the background to make it look distant and out of focus
- Learned a fair amount of procedurally loading ‘chunks’ for levels using 2 approaches.
-the crappy way, has it cycle between 2 chunks, by adjusting locations and accessing things outside of itself, eww
-better way I used a list of several chunks that just pop/add accordingly and using a proper ‘chunk’ class that handles all of it self contained reference, without having to access much outside. - I experimented with 10 different algorithms for generating the levels, including various noise, tunneling, misc approaches. Ended up liking the outcome from a really simple one in the end.
- I also experimented with changing the color of everything using a color filter, including it slowly fading between colors, or changing colors based upon progress. However I couldn’t ever get any of it to look good and it just became distracting, even at subtle smooth transitions.
http://84bit.com/EscapeCopter004.jar
http://84bit.com/EscapeCopter004.zip (contains an .exe designed for windows only)
mirror for jar
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/78352186/EscapeCopter004.jar
The code is a horrendous mess of horribleness right now. I wouldn’t recommend anyone looking but its all 100% there
https://github.com/namrog84/ColorCopterGame :point: Actually this is out of date, will fix soon.
Known issues:
- Warning, don’t right click mouse, it blacks out screen, press G to return, though.
- Occasionally, it seems like the parallax background scrolling ‘disappears’ but returns. I think I isolated it all, however it might still be present.
- It might accidentally generate impossible passable terrain
- In some instances you might be able to squeeze out of the map, though the camera is semi locked to certain vertical displacement.
- The particles under the helicopter’s rotors aren’t quite right in a variety of ways(location/appearance). However I just said screw it and left it as a minimal special effect.
Aside from maybe trying to get it working on android and html5, I am not going to poke at it a whole lot more.
Despite that, I would still greatly any criticism or feedback on anything I’ve done. Just remember it was meant to be ‘limited’ In the sense that I don’t have powerups, diversity, or a whole lot going on. Just a simple Infinite Runner Helicopter game
:persecutioncomplex: :
:o :clue: :yawn:
game runs at 1280x720
Screen shot Image:
Added an android version
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.newrog.coptergame
It doesn’t have the background blur that the desktop version though, and its ever so slightly occasionally laggy 
At least on my S3