Rock Warrior
Rock Warrior (2009)
Rock Warrior is an entry to the 15th Ludum Dare 48 hour game development competition. Given theme was “Caverns”.
I liked the theme and thought of a mountain consisting of rocks, using a Voronoi diagram to make a certain rocky feeling. I made some sketches to paper and other stuff and initially decided I’d just use some simple circles instead. But then I remembered iq had written a nice article about cellular fx, reviewed it and used it. With some more tweaking and I had solved how I want to make the visual side.
A few more implementation details. The level is simply a single bitmap with some meta data encoded to the color values, e.g. #ff00ff=spawn, #00ffff=sky (draw cell but ignore collisions). Each pixel is handled as a single cell in a grid, with a voronoi “rock” put in a random position inside the cell. Additionally some cells are gold drawn with an extra flare and they give you points (“cash”) when fully consumed. And red cells are considered “lava”, whose positions are slightly animated – which looks nice in the real-time Voronoi diagram. Rock radius is simply decreased when it is collided against with slow speed. When colliding with high speed, player will bounce instead.
I’m not totally happy how the actual gameplay turned out, but I blame partly the fact that from start to finish of the two days I were very tired and didn’t actually use that much time on the development. I was still very inspired of the theme, and had a lot more ideas how to develop the game further. As a funny tidbit, I used the sfxr tool for both sound effects and for samples of the music.