June 20th 2022: Welcome Peoples!

Welcome Peoples!

I don't know what to say... my last updates have upwards of 30+ readers, so that means there's people actually reading these, and paying attention to the game! Thanks so much! I honestly expected big fat zeroes, so I was writing mostly for myself. Now it's time to write for the people! Even though it's a small number, I know now that there's at least a few people interested in Splonking.

So what is it?

So for those that might be new to the game: Splonking is a game inspired by old arcade games, where you try to get as deep into a mysterious moon-tunnel as you can, dodging all sorts of obstacles and enemies.

The main influences for the game include Lunar Lander and Asteroids and a bit of Solar Jetman for NES. The control is all about the physics system: constant gravity is always pulling you downward, while your only controls are rotation and your thruster jets. The controls can be a bit difficult to get the hang of, but once you get them down they're extremely responsive. Thankfully in Splonking you don't have to waste a bunch of quarters/tokens to learn the controls! It's a simple high-score contest: get as far as you can.

So what else?

The game has 10 original music tracks recorded and composed by yours truly, including 8 unique gameplay themes to try to make the gameplay experience more varied. They're in a sort of 'electro-funk' style. 

Graphics were all me, literally drawn from scratch or adapted from freely reusable sprites found online. They'll probably undergo some changes and tweaking before any theoretical "release"

All coding is done in C++, using SDL and extensions of SDL like SDL_Mixer, etc. I've tried to write the game so that I can adapt the engine to other 2d games: it'll take a lot of tweaking and rewriting, but my next goal is to have a fully-functional 2d game engine in SDL that I can use for future games. 

What are the updates?

Well this week was mostly spent chasing down a nasty bug: starting on Level 8, laser turrets spawn that shoot lasers to the left or right that destroy everything in their path. I was playing, and had a hard-crash; no clue why. 

I finally tracked it down to only happening when the turrets were on screen. I had recently updated the turrets animation so that seemed like a good location: I checked the log files, and... nothing. 

Turns out it was a null pointer error, because of, get this: an off-by-one error. (shocking!) If the milliseconds of a turret's firing animation ever hit precisely 0, kabam, SDL was trying to load a null pointer. Easy fix (>= instead of >) but it took a lot of testing and logging to locate the error because it wasn't throwing an error, just... crashing.

There's been some more QoL improvements: I've had a few friends test the game and I'm "softening" the physics a bit to try to make it easier for beginners, but it's still got a steep learning curve and I've come to accept that: Lunar Lander was flippin' impossible for new players too!

What's the future look like?

I've been working on a cfg/ini type file that the game reads settings from and it works fine, (for controller remapping, full-screen/windowed, scanlines on/off, etc) but I don't have an in-game menu to edit them yet: that's the next step. Shouldn't be TOO hard, but I say that a lot. I hope to have a downloadable version of the game to test by the end of the month. Windows only as of yet. 

I know the game suffers much from the "developer difficulty" problem, where I can play the game just fine and score well but there's a steep learning curve, so I'm going to be hoping people find the game and test it out and give me some feedback on how I can make it more accessible to the general public: but simply by design, it's still going to have a steep learning curve. I've accepted that now.

Anything else?

Nope not really. Thanks for reading, and look for a downloadable version next week!