Of Choppers, Physics, and Challenge

By on 3/9/2010

After receiving some sage advice from Andy "The ZMan" Dunn, I posted up the prototype of a game that I am working on for play test on the XNA Creator's Club site: http://forums.xna.com/forums/t/49219.aspx



The game focuses on controlling a small 2d chopper through a maze. There are "fans" which push and pull the chopper into the walls which of course will make it more difficult to navigate.

I got the idea after my brother-in-law received a small indoor helicopter for christmas. We all had so much fun trying to carefully control it (as much as one can control those tiny copters) and even trying to land it strange places like the blade of a ceiling fan. I thought that it would be fun to play a game that required the same skill. I was able to fairly quickly make a simple prototype (even simpler than what I posted up for playtest) using the FlatRedBall engine's built in acceleration and collision functions.

The prototype I posted up is quite rough around the edges as it is just a prototype; But the idea is to get the community's feedback early, before you have invested a lot of blood, sweat, and tears into a game. If you wait until the end to get a playtest, you will be so invested in what you've been working on that you will resist they playtester's feedback. I hope to get some good ideas about possible directions that I could take it in ... and hopefully it will validate the direction that I've already got in my mind. But who knows, I might get an idea that I was not expecting. That's the great thing about getting it in front of other people early.

We will see just how far along I can get before my Orlando Code Camp presentation, which incidentally, is about actually finishing a game (this game). I'll definitely have more to post on this topic after the codecamp :-)

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