And... it's over ;)

2 November 2019

With a viewport and side-impact detection implemented it is now possible to lose this game :D

I added a life counter because, well, why not? And a ‘game over’ screen to make it obvious when no lives remain.

Along the way, I realised that I need the concept of time in the engine, but I ignored that for now and just used a cycle count (icky).

As I predicted, the viewport movement is not as smooth as I would have liked, there is a noticeable transition when the cursor becomes locked to the screen centre. But, I’m going to ignore that for now and hope it improves with the coming control changes. If not, I’ll have to try the other option I suppose.

(losing a game)

Under Thrust

To feel if the viewport mechanism is too juddery the next priority has become making the ship powered under thrust. Decoupling the movement from the exact mouse location might help the feeling, it might not.

The mouse will act as a thrust on the ship. When no thrust is operating, the ship will continue moving under inertia. This implies that in addition to the current ship location, we also need to track the ship direction and velocity. Furthermore, I finally need to update the ship rendering from a blob to something that shows the direction, and ideally, some indication fo the thrust being applied.

Converting acceleration to velocity is also going to require time. So it’s time to add the concept of time into the engine. More specifically, the elapsed time between ticks.

With a bit of luck, putting all these in place will leave us with the first core mechanic complete.