I just learned how to screen capture animated GIFs on PC which is way easier than recording a whole screen cap video and uploading to YouTube, so yeah. That’s awesome. I did it using a free app called GifCam for Windows, which you can get here for free. Thanks to the guy over at Bahraini Apps. His other thing Paper Toy Factory actually looks totally radical and amazing too, looking forward to that coming. My kids will LOVE that.
Anyway, here’s the GIF:
I had to take some time off on the game but I’ve been back on it working pretty hard and made some good progress. I’m learning to optimize things a bit and so have been managing to avoid turning the game into a slideshow running at 1FPS all the time. I’ve also scaled back a bit on my original design.
Here’s a basic update of where I’m at and going:
Pollen is a 3rd person flying shooter with six degrees of freedom and rogue-like-like elements including procedural levels and permadeath.
Style: I’m going for a low poly, playstation one graphical feel. Lots of primitives, few textures. This is a combination of necessity and aiming for a post-pixel ‘retro’ feel.
Stuff in the game:
Randomized procedural level geometry
Player flight controls
basic shooting
homing missiles
one enemy type
basic enemy AI
basic enemy pursuit / wandering movement
4 basic environments: foggy water, dark desert, bamboo, underwater ice.
two music tracks
title screen
gameover screen
Stuff that’s coming:
Randomized player powerups
Win state
more enemy types
larger boss-like enemies
lots more music tracks
lots of control tuning