Colourbind's first appearance

[Dinaroozie]

Okay, so the time has come for me to get my act together and make a thread for my entry. I have spent a good five minutes making a little page about the game, which I will link to, for your perusal (including screenshots): Colourbind

The game is progressing along merrily thus far. I am but a lone designer/programmer, so the audio-visual experience will probably be somewhat lacking, but hopefully it will still be fun if I can get some of the fruitier mechanics working later on. I am acquainted with some professional musos, however, so there is an outside chance that I can call in a favour and include some wildly inappropriate background music, which would be awesome.

For the curious, the game is written in C++. I've used GLUT for the windowing and input, and OpenGL for the graphics. The physics is a library called ODE, while the collision detection is a product of my own fevered mind.

Anyways. Hope you guys like the idea.

~ Finn

[Patrick Alexander]

I do! It's very clever.

Good luck designing levels and stuff!

[monoRAIL]

This looks very interesting. I think you could use some kind of visual aid to help the player remember what direction the different colored gravities fall - perhaps animated arrows in the background, or flowing colors of some kind. I think exploding blocks would also be interesting puzzle elements.

[Dinaroozie]

Hi guys. Thanks for your interest and suggestions.

The visual feedback thing is definitely on the list. I'm thinking of having flagpoles with three coloured ribbons hanging from them, and placing them around the level to indicate gravity at a given time. That'd have the added bonus of looking cool when gravity changes suddenly. Or, in the highly unlikely event that I don't get around to implementing that, a compass-type dealie as part of the HUD will keep you informed.

As for explosions - that could be pretty cool! There definitely needs to be a way to exert force on things from a distance... explosions might be ideal. The trick, of course, is getting it implemented in time...

~ Finn

[malloc]

Very interesting idea!

The tricky part will be designing the levels.

[bicilotti]

Need to... see... video... NOW!

[Dinaroozie]

Well, I tracked down a really frustrating memory leak, and so by way of celebration I've gotten my act together and uploaded some video. It's nothing new - it's pretty much the screenshots from above but in video form. There are a bunch of new things in place now (trigger system, woo!) but I like the simplicity of the three stacks of boxes.

Behold

the video

in all its thirty-second glory. The game is actually a bit quicker than that video implies, and the image quality has been pretty badly molested by the different processes it went through to get to youtube (not to mention my lack of expertise with this process), but the idea's there. Hope you like it.

~ Finn

[monoRAIL]

This has really got a lot of potential! I'm looking forward to seeing what kind of puzzles you come up with. I see you've got a suspension bridge in there - I bet you could do some really cool stuff with springs and ropes made up of different colored segments, so that they spring back or fall in different directions when one end is cut.

[Muz]

Cute
It looks like something I'd do if I hadn't done something else. Glad it appeared before I came up with my idea

[Dinaroozie]

So I came across the following piece of code in my project today.

	//For reasons unknown, this bounding box check screws everything up.
	if (!getDynamicWorldAABB().containsPoint(point)){
		return Collision();
	}

I don't know why it screws everything up, or in what way, or why the check is still in there, given the comment. Still, I think it's a pretty good sign.

Anyway, Colourbind is progressing along gradually. Now in operation:

• A front end, title screen, level selection, etc.
• Switches that can open and close doors, and change gravity, and other things.
• Lasers, that change the colour of objects that they hit, leading to good times.
• About eight levels (I think) that you can play through to the end.

A more complete update will be on its way on the weekend, with screenshots and such.