Welcome to the world of colored spheres. In this world you will notice 3 different species. The blue prey, the red attackers, and the intelligent yellow ball. You will be the intelligent yellow ball and your goal is to kill all blue prey. The catch is that the red balls know of your presence and everytime you kill one of their comrades a red ball will appear to try to knock you off. Every blue prey you kill 2 will appear in its place. Its OK your goal is to cause as much pain and suffering to the blue balls as possible so the more the better. If you run into a blue ball they will launch off in a given direction, but if the red balls hit you, you will fly off in a given direction. Good luck.
The goal of this week was to use ODE. I envisioned a few different things I could do going into it. I decided to go with this concept because it made collision detection easy and with fast collision detection I could do a lot. It also enabled me to make a heightfield. I explored making a very pronounced heightfield but this made the actual game play not as fun. So I lowered it to just little bumps.
My method was pretty straight forward. I started out making a sphere and making a heightfield. Once i had this and gravity set I tweaked the controls until I got it so it felt right. Then I added spheres that collided with you and caused you to get pushed off. Once I had those it was easy to create spheres that got pushed instead of pushed you. The rest of the game was just tweaking the different speed of each type of enemy and figuring out a few bugs.
This game is pretty fun. As you knock more blues off more and more come. As you get deep into the game and you are getting launched into the air by reds you can look down on them and see their unique interactions that are caused by the way I programmed them. The red balls are always attracted towards the user by some random speed. The blue balls though have a more unique behavior. When created they pick a random partner to always be attracted towards. The problem arises when their partner falls off the edge they would just keep jumping right off with them. So I added a parameter where if they got to close to the edge they would select a new partner. The red balls behavior is interesting because as you get more and more of them with different speed constants they seem to behave as one creature that is always after you.
I gained a lot of experience with this program with using ODE. I didn't expect to have the interesting results with the ball movements but I am happy with the way they turned out. I think this game is pretty fun as you get better at it.
WASD - move
UP and DOWN - adjust camera pitch
MOUSE - adjust camera direction
LEFT MOUSE CLICK - jump
There may be a bug in the game where intially your contact with the blue balls doesn't have a significant result. If this happens just make contact with one of the red balls and all should be resolved. Sorry for the inconvenience I have marked it as To Be Fixed.