Day # 3! In the early days of the video game industry, developers had to face huge technical constraints. Despite these boundaries, I was always amazed by what you could achieve with little of technology. In all these feats, what fascinated me
was this ability to create multitudes of independent objects each with its own « role » to play. Some objects had a life of just a second but it was enough to add something to the overall composition.
Play the Interactive Study here : https://loganou974.itch.io/gms-day-3-bullets-in-2d-games-
The « Shoot’em up! » games are for me the consecration of this « dance » of instantiated objects, each having a rightful place in a playful choreography. I could spend hours watching someone play because it was « beautiful to see ». It has not changed with age, and I think that there is really something to work on this aesthetic side, this « beautiful » algorithm that manages the life of ephemeral moving objects… in the chaos of ship destructions lol. We could store this pursuit of « beautiful » patterns in the « Sensation » section of the MDA Framework, Game as
sense-pleasure. Furthermore, as we
are in desperate need of patterns to devour (Raph Koster, Theory of Fun), we search sense in chaos, like when we watch bees and try to understand their random « noisy » moving pattern.
So, I wanted to try to understand what is behind the generation of these objects optimized for real-time, via the « Object Pooling » System, and see how far I could go in a day … Well, a lot of my « tries » are not watchable in the demo scene because i failed to make some more « advanced » shots the way i wanted ! Too bad, better next time !
In the time available, I wanted to focus on a system of adding guns that would adjust the position of the guns according to their number. If I had more time, I would have liked to test the « curvature » of a shot to continue playing with the animations curves.