Here are the first two screen shots of my new game Elements. Keep in mind that all of the graphics so far were made in paint, and are for test purposes only. The ship is now controlled by the WASD keys, while automatically rotating it's self to face the crosshair controlled by the mouse. And I used some simple trig to vector the bullets towards the crosshair. I can't believe that frikin trigonometry could get used outside of school. Anyway, the ship and the bullets change color if you fly over one of the three orbs. It's a very early build, and really just for testing and feeling out the design, but it's nice to at least get a little something up on the screen.

Some things that will need some special attention already: the bullets do not fly towards the center of the crosshair. They fly towards the upper left corner of it. Sometimes a rogue bullets flies in the exact opposite direction that it should. I think there's a division by zero problem somewhere, but my buggy compiler doesn't pick up on it. Also, the bullets start looking really weird and the spacing gets jacked up whenever I turn the speed up. I may have to get creative with that problem, but I honestly think that they'll look and behave a lot better once I put some decent looking graphics on the sprites.

I worked out the code for some simple gun turrets that pace along the edges of the screen, and I want to get them into this build as soon as possible. It'll be a good opportunity to see how many enemies/bullets I can get away with on-screen before the frame rate suffers.

But this week, I think the focus will mostly be on graphics, at least until the weekend. I usually like to do art during the work week, and save the coding for the weekends when I'm not all beat up and tired from work. I messed around with Bryce earlier today and got some really good ideas for the look of the game - kind of a semi transparent colored glass sort of thing. I'll have this game looking at least somewhat decent by this weekend, along with a little more functionality. I also want to start experimenting with the HUD layout. Right now, I'm thinking of having it in a strip along the bottom of the screen. Oh, and I'm definitely switching to a finer screen resolution than 800x600.

As always, if anyone wants to play the game or has any ideas about it, feel free to let me know.