The BitBull Blog

First things first – fixed the scanner wobble! I’m now rendering the scanner to an offscreen image (RenderTarget2D) before drawing to screen which means I don’t have to worry about any rounding errors due to the scaling of sprite locations.

Later I’m going to look at applying some custom shaders to this for a bit of ‘interference noise’ and to send the scanner a little haywire when you bump into things.

This’ll do for now though – the raster effect I’ve applied looks OK but unfortunately doesn’t really come across in the GIF which had to be compressed quite a bit to get within the 5mb limit for Twitter.

Next job was to add some terrain to the ‘Jetboard Joust’ world. This was pretty easy on the whole, only difficulty is that you end up with a lot of objects to check against for collisions – particularly when enemies need to interact with the terrain as well (which some of them will do).

To solve this I’ve opted for what I think is a fairly standard gamedev solution. The world is split into a bunch of ‘segments’, each of which contains two smaller segments (a bit like Russian dolls). I stop subdividing when we get to around screen size. The smallest segments contain pointers to the terrain elements that intersect them.

Now when collision checking I only need to iterate through terrain elements in the segment which intersect the sprite I am checking against, this makes collision checking pretty efficient as I can effectively discard half the elements in the world with one Rectangle.Intersects check.

You’ll see I’ve added the terrain to the scanner too – I like the ‘blocky’ way this looks, it reminds me of ‘Defender’ on the Atari VCS 2600.

I’m not at all happy with the tiles for the terrain yet – they need completely redoing so look at these as placeholder graphics. I’m thinking of attempting a kind of ‘strange ruined city’ type look.

If you’re very observant you’ll notice I added a slight automatic ‘boost’ when the player rides into the side of as terrain element. A proportion of the horizontal velocity is transferred to vertical velocity here which I think makes the game feel a lot more fluid.

Dev Time: 1 day
Total Dev Time: approx 15.5 days

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