(Alright, I guess a week was a bit optimistic. I’ll do better.)
I feel like I’m going in a bunch of different directions at once on Lazer Maze (I’m really going to have to come up with a unclaimed name for it…), with not much of a unified plan penciled in yet (as if I’d stick to a plan anyway). I’ll try to stick to one topic at a time here, though, because the erstwhile librarian still in me demands organization.
One of our subjects meditates on all the terrible life decisions that led him to this point.
So! Graphics! James D. Spain (or JDS, as he’s known back in the ‘hood) painted a gorgeously stark black-and-white tableau in the original game, surely a metaphor for the bleakness of the plight our characters — and indeed, all of creation — find themselves in. Clearly I could never improve on it, but I’m not sure it would technically be good form to swipe the original “assets” without permission, but I am still inclined to go with a retro-ish look, so I dunno. Hopefully our design servants students are really good at drawing reflectors in multiple forms? But I’m putting the cart before the horse here.
Since I only knew the very basics of iOS graphics before starting this, so as ever, I hit up my friend Ray Wenderlich, and worked through this tutorial Now I still only know the very basics, pretty much, but in a much more recent way! And luckily, I doubt I’ll need too much more than the basics to make a game about lines moving around a grid (watch that come back to haunt me). The major new takeaway from the tutorial for me was the existence of Live Rendering. Neato! Now I’ll be able to see that my code doesn’t work in no time flat.
Keen! Now, my next move is to work up a basic prototype of how a laser will calculate its path and animate itself through a maze. Also, learn a little about sprites? It’ll be zaptacular!
