I don’t know if you remember the game that I claimed to be working on about three months ago; it’s definitely been a while. I had this idea over the summer to make a sweet and very involved Java game with my CS 101 experience – there were going to be multiple maps and physics and stuff blowing up and dinosaurs and it was going to be sweet. It was originally going to be mostly a learning experience to get me more acquainted with object oriented programming (which it absolutely has been), and it wasn’t really intended to be a project that I’d necessarily make into anything polished. After working on it for a while, though, it started to snowball and I figured “how hard could it be to make an Ikaruga clone?”. As it turns out, it’s both challenging from a programming perspective and time-consuming on the art side. I worked on it for about a month and a half with incredible persistence and then kind of fell off – I think I was intimidated by the huge amount of work I’d set out for myself. I had to program the whole game engine from scratch, draw all the sprites and backgrounds, animate them, and come up with a decent storyline. Basically I lost interest because it seemed kind of impossible. The project never totally left my mind though, I was always a moment away from working on it again. I have a mostly-complete game engine that I’ve made scalable to include more enemies, patterns, and areas, as well as a bunch of enemy sprites and two 8-bit audio tracks. Today, for some reason, I decided to pick it up again, and that I want to be done by the end of the semester. It’ll give me something to do and feel good about. I did significantly alter my initial expectations on how it would be when it was finished – my original project was just really daunting. But if all goes well I’ll have a sweet little Galaga-style arcade game by the end of May. Here are some screenshots of what I have so far (it’s all in the 8-bit visual style minus the background, which I have yet to draw correctly).
Also, Super Mario Kart is so annoyingly tough. Always has a super star regardless of where in the lap he is, and he always uses it right as you’re about to pass him. It’s not cool, and I hate Luigi. He makes it impossible to win the Flower Cup at 150 cc. Seriously, I’ve tried it probably twenty times and on the third course, he always comes from behind at the last moment and screws me. It’s not funny anymore, Luigi. Just go home. We all know you’re awesome at kart racing. Just stop, man. And Chrono Trigger is still taking a year and a day. I’m done two of the side quests and I still have five to go and probably a bunch more training before I try Lavos again…it’s a good thing that’s such a good game, because otherwise I’d probably have stopped playing by now.