Art
* I added some graphics to several elements in game that were still showing solid colors.
* I did some research on the art and I created a bunch of assets in Photoshop to see how it would look. My goal would be to go for a cartoony style. As I did for the sounds assets I would like to create a humorous look. At this point the final look really depends on how much time I could devote to the art before the deadline.
Gameplay
* I added counters to the pills, so each player has a limited amount of pills to use in game
* Now the player gets an infinite amount of the pills that are essential for the gameplay, such as a the bait pill. Play still get a certain number of other spcial pills chosen randomly. This makes the game more balanced.
* I implemented some more pill types from my pill table
* I changed the action of edible pill, so that frogs can only eat them if they are close enough, and on the same side of the fence. The bait pill is now a smellable pill and it is what you must use to have the frog jump from one side of the fence to the other.
Todo
Well, the deadline is next week and I am already in TOTAL ULTIMATE CRUNCH MODE. My plan is to have the finished game by Tuesday, so that I can spend the whole day Wedsday for last minute tweaks. These are the things that need to be done:
* Implement more pill types. As in the Worms game, variety is a key aspect of my game too, so I’ll try to add as many pills types as I can in the next few days. I have to finish implementing the detonator/dynamite pill, and I would like to add at least one more timed pill.
* Add starting menu and title. I already created the graphics for it and implemented a class for HUD elements. It should be pretty straightforward to add the menu system.
* I already implemented a particle system, I would like to use it to add more flare to some exising pill actions.
* Do the remaining art.
* There are a few Farseer related outstanding bugs that can break gameplay, so it is critical that I fix them. The bugs are:
- After an explosion the frog is thrust at great speed toward a wall, and sometimes the collision detection may fail causing the frog to get stuck inside the the wall. I already have a solution for this problem and I also implemented the necessary code pulling out a frog from the wall. I just have to write the required routines to detect and resolve the problem when it occurs.
- Frogs and pills may sometimes just fall on top of the fence and sit there forever. There is an easy fix for this one — I should simply add a circular collision geometry on top of the fence, so that objects cannot sit there forever.
* Add more visual effects. Right now I fake flare effects using transparent textures. If I have time I will do it using shaders.
You can find the latest stable build of my prototype here. This is not quite the latest build, but is the most recent one that is fully playable.
What I am doing right now
Well, I am not trying to be super picky about my code (as I usually am), I really had to make some modifications to the state machine I use to implement the main game logic. This change will make it much simpler for me to add more pill types and it makes my implementation far less error-prone.