You know, I really should stop doing these major coding weekends since it they slightly burn me out and in the end, I realize I'm not as good as I hoped. :) Well, it did help me not think about my financial situation, but I pretty much spent from Friday evening to Monday afternoon programming way too many hours.

I got a minimum "game" done Monday, with a main menu, help, credits, back story (about lettuce), the game itself, and the game over. You have a score and it play. So, I have a game. However, it is isn't polished, but I realize that I simply don't have the experience or tools to make a really polished game in three weeks. Its one of those skills that takes time and effort to do and I haven't done it yet. So, my game is rather spartan in appearance. It also, in the words of Danc from Lost Garden might say, "where is the fun." I mean, its fun to see how well you can get a ship through the procedural maze, but its still missing things.

I'm going to spend the rest of the week working on the polish of the game, to make it a bit more fun and work on one feature I think will help the game. And maybe sounds. Actually, ship construction and sounds are pretty much my two plans for the end of the week, though I'm taking Friday/Saturday to Sunday off for Fluffy's blackbelt, assuming I can scrape up enough money to afford driving back to Illinois.

I also have screenshots.

This is the main menu, pretty isn't it? I'll direct your attention to the font. While it isn't the most impressive thing, I did create it this weekend. Yep, starting my first font ever. TrueType and all. I have every letter you can type on a US 104 keyboard, curly quotes, and the Euro symbol on it. Sadly, Fluffy beat me to making a font and she does a better one; imagine that, a professional graphic designer being good at graphics. :P

I made a scrolling text mode to display the back story, credits, and help for now. I got the idea from Meritous on how to do it easily. Later, I'd love to make the back story a small video using the graphics from Glorious Saber but I simply didn't have the time.

The first thing you see when you start playing the game. The little square is your "ship" right now. I want to make it a bit more procedural. Actually, I want you to be able to pick up ship parts through the game.

The basic stage has a junction with 1-n junctions hanging off of it. As you fly toward one of them, the game automatically creates more stages and swaps out the junction (rather smoothly actually) so you can keep on flying. That way, you only see a small section of the entire map, but you can pretty much fly forever. And, if you are feeling silly, you can pretty much go back at any point and see the same junction, even 3, 10, 100 stages before.

More junction loading. I'm doing some neat trick with background threads to do this so the game doesn't really pause as it is working. Instead, it preloads the area as you get close to the swapping point. I was pretty happy with the results, once I tweaked the physics setting so it takes less than a few seconds, in case you are going over 300 m/s.

And finally, games must start and games must end. The basic "score" of the game is the number of people you save. Not how many you kill, what things you blow up, just how many people you save. I'm pretty happy with the basis of the game, it seems... right.

So, I hope you like these. It's pretty much three weeks of my life right there. This week, I hope to have a download so people can try to play it (though I know you won't :P).