Thinking about the asteroids mod

Over the past few days, I have been thinking about what would make for a fun mod to asteroids. I have had a number of ideas, but there have only been a few that haven’t swayed too far from the original gameplay of asteroids. Of these, i have one favored one. I call it, BASHTEROIDS. No, i actually don’t have a name for it, and i have learned my lesson with prematurely naming games (i.e. spacetacular voyage).

My asteroids is like asteroids on steroids. Actually, its more like asteroids with physics. The general idea is that you shoot in the same way, but when you shoot, the bullets don’t destroy the asteroids, but instead collide with them, pushing them back. Whenever you push an asteroid off the screen, you get points. Pretty simple right?

To add to this, I’m going to have a “charge” system, which allows you to charge up to use various special powers, for example, becoming untouchable, (so you can use your ship to push asteroids out). To make the charge system interesting, whenever you land a bullet on one of the asteroids, a small collectable will pop out at a random angle. Collecting these will fill up your charge meter, which will mean you will have to challenge yourself to get the special attack (by putting yourself in danger).

This idea would be pretty sweet in terms of implementation. Just a bit of fiddling around with BOX2D ( a physics engine in flash) should do it. Also, there is no way it would be playable with regular asteroids controls, I’ll need to think about implementing shooting via the mouse, and possibly movement as well.
I’m going to at least prototype it, and see how i feel about it. You can expect the prototype by the end of the weekend, unless I bludge as much as i usually do.

Yours truely. Sir Shatsworth.

Why I’m Here

I’m Sash.

The reason that i took this course is because I love games, and I also love thinking about and making them. This far in my life, I’ve toyed around with a bunch of game idea’s, and brought one into fruition, which i lamely named Spacetacular Voyage.

Despite the name, I really enjoyed developing and playing the game, it gave me an awesome chance to experiment with how to make something fun. It was a particularly simple idea, so most of the fun manifested in the level design, which was fairly challenging. You’ll see what I mean when you give it a whirl: http://www.kongregate.com/games/sashmackinnon/spacetacular-voyage.

What got me into making games in the first place? Playing them. I remember the first game I ever properly got into was Yoshi’s Island, and even at that young age, I think it was about 6 or 7, I was yearning to know how they had made it. I thought perhaps they had drawn every possible frame. Then, a bit later on, I got seriously into click’n'play. I spent hours making small stupid games.

The next step was back in year nine, i was introduced to flash. First I animated, then i started coding. I remeber one of the very first games I made was a game called pixel pop, which was similar to a turn based game of tag, only when you were tagged, you would inflate. First person to pop would lose, of course, it is was much easier to tag someone once you were already huge. It created alot of drama.

After that I would be continuously thinking of games and game ideas. I can’t wait to really get into this course, already I have found that it has elaborated on a lot of idea’s i have had, just haven’t properly articularted.