Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
More bonus options. Currently the only bonus in the game is to give the player one more life.
Some of the more interesting options I'm considering are bonuses that allow one player to be
faster than the others for a period of time, to allow him to break or jump over walls, or even shoot
projectiles at other players. Maintaining the balance of the game with these new bonuses is going
to be challenging. With new features for the human users, the AI players will need to get smarter
as well, since I don't want the game to be too easy to win.
More grid models from a wider variety of shapes. The current camera control system limits the
types of grid models to shapes that have a well-defined center and with a surface that is mostly
visible from the outside. Working up a finer level of camera control will allow a wide variety of
interesting grid meshes; for instance, the ones in Figure 8-18.
Figure 8-18.
Grid models that would be possible for play with a better camera control scheme.
One possible future extension that seems natural for a game like CycleBlob is online multiplayer play. One
promising direction for that is the use of HTML5 WebSockets for two-way communications between clients
and a server that is responsible for maintaining the shared state of the game. Implementing a real-time
state for multiple players over the internet is a challenge, even for commercial games fully backed by a
team of experts and implemented in C++. I expect that making multiplayer work well for CycleBlob would
require at least as much time as it took to implement the game itself, so that may be difficult to achieve in
the near future.
Reference
Table 8-2 lists mathematical symbols used in this chapter for reference. Coordinates and vectors are an
ordered set of three floating-point numbers (x,y,z).
Table 8-2.
Mathematical Symbols Used in This Chapter
Symbols
Definition
a,b,c
(coordinates) Vertices of a single triangle when calculating its normal
P
(coordinates) A point on the surface of the grid mesh over which the player's bike is situated
