Saturday, June 16, 2007

Howl's Moving Castle

This week I managed quite a few small additions/changes. The first thing was the radar/compass widget. Take a look (the arrows around the border):

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The green arrows are landing pads, and the red are enemy ships. It works quite well.

The next thing was changing the movement method from direct velocity to inertial control. This change made the game a LOT more interesting. Now there's actually a point to combat. This change also opens the door to a lot of physics weapons.

The last changes were more under the hood, but they are paving the road to allow game saving/loading, which I feel is important even this early in the game. (heh)

Now that we've got the game dev report out of the way, I saw a great movie last night. All of you have probably already seen it... Howl's Moving Castle. I had not even heard of it until yesterday, and I absolutely loved the movie. In a lot of ways, it's the art style that I would like to have for Watcher. Howl's was a little too old-fashioned for what I have in mind, but the point is that there are airships and airplanes and such that are steam powered. The art style I hope for is some kind of mix between the old fashioned and futuristic. So, not everything will be coal steam powered, but also nuclear/fusion steam powered. There will be laser weapons and computers alongside the mechanical steam stuff. Anyway, if you haven't seen Howl's moving castle, you should. The art is amazing, and the story is amazing, if not a little strange. The plot isn't necessarily amazing, it's the storytelling that is fantastic.

1 comment:

Griffin said...

Just passing through here. If you haven't seen Castle in the Sky, you might like that one too. Same director, same general technological ideas (not sure if you'd call it "steampunk" or not) and lots of nifty flying machines. Characters and plot are a bit weak, but lovely visuals.