Rocketsmith (+ livestream!)

General (non-technical) CoronaBlitz
#1

I’m going to take a shot at a second entry. This may be too much for four hours but I’m going to give it a shot anyway. To be fair, I’ve had this idea for a while… The blitz is just a good excuse to attempt a quick prototype.

Rocketsmith takes a little from three different games I love: Galaga, Minecraft, and Bad Piggies. The idea is that you control a very rudimentary craft floating through space in the wake of some sort of intergalactic war, and there is space junk floating around everywhere. Like you would imagine the area around the Death Star after it blew up, assuming it wasn’t all consumed by the explosion. Probably lots of random metal plates and springs and turbines and wires and whatnot. So your job is to navigate through that stuff, collecting whatever you can, and then use what you collect to craft into new implements for your ship. And the choices you make about how to arrange and configure those add-ons will have a significant effect on your ability to successfully navigate various levels.

There’s a lot in there that I don’t really have any sort of feel for how to accomplish, but hopefully I can get something basic down. We’ll see!

Livestreaming my first submission, “Sequence”, was nerve wracking, but it forced me to keep going and kept me from going too deep down any rabbit holes, which in this particular situation was quite useful. So I’m going to stream this one too!

http://www.twitch.tv/brainofsteel

#2

What countdown timer do you use?  Yes, I am watching now for a bit :slight_smile:  What radio station were you listening too?  I assume something on Pandora?

#3

Yeah, pandora. I just typed in “Mat Zo” and Pandora did the rest :slight_smile: Countdown software is called “Time Up”.

#4

I did watch you “struggle” with your scene flipping code early on, with the IDs and they weren’t “showing” up visually.  I wanted to interact and help you out, that you made the rectangles not visible, but you ended up figuring it out with fantastic troubleshooting skills too!  It’s remarkable how some people don’t have such skills.

I use menubar countdown myself for the timer, it’s a small menubar widget thing.  You can google it and last time I checked it was free.  You should also stop by the IRC room once in a while.

#5

Heh. Yeah, in retrospect it’s silly that I had forgotten about setting those to invisible. Actually what was going on at the time was that my wife had just walked in asking me to help find some tools that a neighbor needed to borrow, so I was pretty distracted. But that’s nothing compared to how I struggled with the “crafting” logic later, roughly hours 1 through 3.5. Somehow I just hadn’t quite thought it through before going at it and ended up having to do a LOT of trial and error. I think if I had started with the data structures and crafting logic worked out, I may have had time to finish the entire game. As it is, it basically ends at the crafting. But a great experience - one that would have taken days to work through if I hadn’t been under time pressure.

I work with Corona full time, but usually more or less in isolation. I’ll have to stop in the IRC room more. 

#6

Heh, wives can do that to you, especially when you want to sit down and code.  Ping me if you stop in the IRC chat, I’m Tyraziel in there.

#7

What countdown timer do you use?  Yes, I am watching now for a bit :slight_smile:  What radio station were you listening too?  I assume something on Pandora?

#8

Yeah, pandora. I just typed in “Mat Zo” and Pandora did the rest :slight_smile: Countdown software is called “Time Up”.

#9

I did watch you “struggle” with your scene flipping code early on, with the IDs and they weren’t “showing” up visually.  I wanted to interact and help you out, that you made the rectangles not visible, but you ended up figuring it out with fantastic troubleshooting skills too!  It’s remarkable how some people don’t have such skills.

I use menubar countdown myself for the timer, it’s a small menubar widget thing.  You can google it and last time I checked it was free.  You should also stop by the IRC room once in a while.

#10

Heh. Yeah, in retrospect it’s silly that I had forgotten about setting those to invisible. Actually what was going on at the time was that my wife had just walked in asking me to help find some tools that a neighbor needed to borrow, so I was pretty distracted. But that’s nothing compared to how I struggled with the “crafting” logic later, roughly hours 1 through 3.5. Somehow I just hadn’t quite thought it through before going at it and ended up having to do a LOT of trial and error. I think if I had started with the data structures and crafting logic worked out, I may have had time to finish the entire game. As it is, it basically ends at the crafting. But a great experience - one that would have taken days to work through if I hadn’t been under time pressure.

I work with Corona full time, but usually more or less in isolation. I’ll have to stop in the IRC room more. 

#11

Heh, wives can do that to you, especially when you want to sit down and code.  Ping me if you stop in the IRC chat, I’m Tyraziel in there.