Cruel Weekend

The weekend was a failure for my work on Dozen Days of Dice. While I easily finished the original game I conceived, it just wasn't fun enough. Meanwhile, my plans for Coffee Quest Revenge have changed and progress is finally being made.

I really need to write a proper explanation about what I am doing with Dozen Days of dice. The detailed explanation can wait for another day, but the short summary is that I am doing a series of Game in a Day challenges. I am doing one challenge on every weekend I don't have other plans for. While ideally all twelve games in a series should be done over a block of 12 days, right now that isn't practical, so weekends will have to do. While I could release the game I did finish, I instead am going to cheat and declare it a bonus game. It will be used as filler for when I don't have a game ready to release.

The story behind Coffee Quest Revenge is quite interesting. While I was going to do the 3D stuff using Papervision 3D, I was having too much problems getting what I needed to do working. It is certainly possible that what I wanted to do could be done, I don't know the library well enough yet. I keep running into culling issues for which I suspect the solution would be to write a new camera that automatically subdivides partially culled triangles instead of removing them. Of course I would have to familiarize myself with the source code before undertaking such a task, so instead I opted to port my existing ray casting code over to flash.

The existing ray casting code is designed for a step based game not for 360 degrees of freedom. Still, I had started making a 360 degree ray caster for the ultimate retro project so I figured if I could fix the issues I was having with that version it would be simple to port that code over to flash. When I started looking at the code, my mind lead me to a potentially better way of doing the casting. As this was a new algorithm I figured I would do the initial tests of this algorithm as part of the Coffee Quest Revenge. It has been a while since I released a build of CQR so if you go to http://blazinggames.com/games/coming/ you will see the 5th build which features a test over top of the auto map of the casting. I should point out that this is pre-alpha software and it is kind of fragile. The cursor key movement seems to work fine on Windows but the Mac doesn't seem to automatically repeat keys. Likewise, clicking on the auto map captures the keyboard causing the keyboard keys to stop working.