Planning for 2011

In addition to working on sound over the holidays I did some unsuccessful further experiments with the game camera. I want threats to be visible on-screen whenever possible. What I tried was to collect up any turrets that are close enough to hit the rocket, and include them in the set of things that the camera frames. Unfortunately this introduces big discontinuities in the framing circle's position and size as turrets enter and leave. I have camera smoothing, of course, but even so it is much jumpier than I would like. Maybe I need different "frequency bands" of smoothing, with the threats coming and going on a much lower-frequency smoother. I don't know.

I'm in the middle of planning for the upcoming year. At my day job we are in the last couple of months of development on Infamous 2, so that will demand a fair amount of time. Nevertheless I'm going to attempt to devote an hour a night to work on my own projects; this is what novelists with day jobs do, and I'm not going to get much of anywhere on less time than that.

I'm giving up any TV watching that I used to do, as well as most videogame playing that isn't with my daughter. (By the way: it seems to me there is a major dearth of games that are great for playing with your five-year-old. Currently I'm working through Lego Harry Potter with her. This seems like a potentially underserved market.)

In the near term on the lunar lander game, I'm going to do some experiments to determine the feasibility of having multiple planets that you can fly between. This is the major purpose of rockets, after all, and it's a feature most people who've played it have suggested. The big questions are:

Will this work with the physics engine? I'm going to have several very complex objects moving around (the planets) where I used to have most of the complexity in the static part of the world.

How will gravity work out? Currently the gravity all comes from a single point source, so orbits are straightforward ellipses, and are stable. I'm not too worried about having multiple gravity sources for the player; the rocket flies around under power most of the time and doesn't care if its orbits aren't stable. The mothership can stabilize its own orbit with its thrusters; it's already doing that to some extent. I will probably have to fudge the planets themselves so that they don't affect each other, to ensure that they have stable orbits.

How will the camera work out? Currently the camera rotates so that "down" is down. If I have multiple sources of gravity then there will need to be transitions between orientations so I'll have to figure out how that works.

I will reduce the planets to simple circles for purposes of the experiment, to work out travel times, camera, and so forth.