EsTension

A ship of tears, sprouts lies, if you fill her up, you can break some hearts.

EsTension : One word, capital E, capital T.

So called because I have rocks in my head and find the number of people that cant spell extension amusing. I might as well also admit that I belong to the David Cronenberg school of game naming and throw capital letters into things for no apparent reason. Apart from that it is a corruption of surface tension, the ground was originally going to be a sort of jelly thing that didn't work out.

This was thrown together for the experimental gameplay compo, I figured I'd do something the next time one came around and it did, so I did, pretty much everything I do is experimental so its not really that different. I almost manage to stay within the lines of the theme. By almost I mean I only drew on the wall with my crayons 70% of the time.

Took about a week, over a 14 day period, ended up spending 1 week in bed sweating with some icky cold cough thing unable to think straight in the middle of development. Plenty of bits of code where stolen and reworked from my other little projects but the concept and the game was put together within that time frame. It's built using mtasc and swfmill and the source is visible on my svn repo

.Plan was to have these attractor things in space, that got bigger when shot causing more attraction and making it harder to shoot them without crashing. When they got to a big enough point they then went boom and you got to start on the next one. Which is exactly what is here, the water was added because I like water and I knows how to model it as cellular automata without breaking the CPU bank. It also seems like a nice refuel mechanic, I wanted you to have to pop down to the surface and refuel every now and again. The system is actually non closed, you gain more water from refueling than you use so the environment could fill up with water if you where very very bored.

The hearts are very circular, partially because I kind of just took an apple and colored it red but mostly because I want to use simple circular collision so the gfx must form themselves into a circle or fall out of sync with the collision model. A heart shape is not very circular but I was aiming at the experimental game play compo thing so it really had to be hearts or I would lose even more of the tenuous link with the theme

The game, such as it is doesn't work that well, but I do think it does work. I am however really happy with how the control system, keeping the ship in the center of the screen with scale in-out, and the landing in water to refuel turned out well. This is in essence a mouse based version of the Joust control system forced to mate in an unholy union with Gravitar. ( Kinda like a Swanana and a Rashberry. )

The fact that flash has the oomph to handle the 1 dimensional cellular water system was also a pleasant discovery. I wasn't sure it could loop through enough cells for it to feel semi fluid but it turned out good. It still takes a lot of ooomph for something very simple and I would rather model water in 2d cells, but it does work and for something running in flash it feels like a miracle.

This is as finished as it is going to get, I shall now dismantle it and transform it into something else, possibly a giant robot.

Actually I feel like turning it into something similar to Spawn of Evil, in method and madness and antagonists.