Saturday, October 15, 2011

Be careful in building your base.

Make sure you use the right blocks.. or else a Spy might get in.

3 Spies directly to the right of the player.
The spy will look for a soft block.  Once found, it will eat the block, take over its position and form a new one around it.  It is possible to detect if a spy has taken over a block because there will be a small cloud inside of it.

Once a spy has taken a block, it will stay there indefinitely.  If the player decides to mine that block, their drill will not be able to turn it into a form that is of any use.  AKA the block will not drop anything that the player can use.

The spy does no harm to the player and actually completely ignores them.

The next step for the spy is to detect if a friendly is around.  If it is, dissolve the block and let the friendly through.  Essentially, they'll be able to discretely build tunnels into your base and let the enemy in if you don't have the proper surroundings.

This is a fun enemy to have :]

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Laser Doors

I've added proximity doors to AM.  They keep enemy out using lasers but allow bullets through.  To help balance this, I'm going to make them fragile to enemy fire.
Doors closed.

Doors Open
Doors can be stacked on top of eachother (but you cannot put other objects on top of doors).  The doors also have a small delay of about 1/2 second.  Here is the crafting formula:

This is the first object to use diamonds.
You'll notice that it's an expensive object.  Diamonds are very hard to come by.  I wanted it that way, though, because they are also powerful objects in the game.  If anything, I might make it even more expensive.

When I redid the world generation setup, I introduced a bug where the map would sometimes save in the wrong position and spawn the player inside of a block.  I thought this was due to the new map setup when in reality, it was due to the fact that the map now moves behind the different screens.  I'm about 99% sure I've now solved this bug.  My bug list has fortunately been very small.  The only other known bug in the game right now is when you craft an object, if you pick it up and place it in the crafting table instead of your inventory, it will not take the items from the crafting table.  This lets you craft unlimited items.  I think this will be an easy bug to fix (my guess is that it places the item in the crafting table, regenerates a new formula and then when it goes to take all the items, it looks for the new formula instead of the old one thus not finding it's required resources) so I will finish it in this build.

Next on the list is either a time cycle in the game or adding liquids (water or mercury).  This is going to be a really fun update.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

v.03 is Released

This build was mainly for adding screens.  I've added a title screen, intro screen, new world screen, save/pause screen and continue/load screen.  These all function properly both on the 360 and on the PC.

The next build is another fun one.  I'll be adding some more enemy, more structures to build (how about a laser door?), more biomes and hopefully liquids (lava and water so far).