Pocket Defender

Pocket defender is a missile defender like game for Android but with a very simple touch interface. Google playstore link

[pocketdefender-blog]

Phone testing the new main menu UI

[zet23t]

[pocketdefender-blog]

Doing some think working I was able to figure out how to “pin” the clipboard to the touch’s/click’s position when doing an animation blend to have a “juicy” UI. 

It’s actually fairly simple but a bug someplace else kept puzzling me. So here’s what I do:

Determine click point relative to the object (local position)

Create additional transformation matrix that’s to be used for the click effect (moving it a bit back, rotating around x/y axis, based on local click position)

Determine where the local’s position would be with the additional transformation (transformed local position)

Determine the difference vector between the transformed local position and the closest point on the picking ray (eye-mouse 3d vector)

Add the difference vector to the additional transformation matrix. This will compensate the induced click point’s movement that was created by the initial addition transformation matrix configuration.

This sums it roughly up. There are a few details (for example, you have to make sure that the difference vector you determine is transformed into the local coordinate system of the object you want to modify…) that made the implementation taking longer than expected. 

I also figured out while thinking about this that this is pretty much inverse kinematics - with just one element and where the translation vector can be modified in all three axes. Trivial, a person would anyone say who’s familiar with IK systems. Well… took me a while ;)

[pocketdefender-blog]

After posting an animation earlier I had the idea that the clipboard should react to the user touches in a physical way. The GIF doesn't reflect very good how it feels, but it gives an impression... it actually feels pretty nice!

[pocketdefender-blog]

Adding a simple hover effect to improve feedback a bit. Not contributing much, but wasn't too much work either.

[pocketdefender-blog]

Just thought to upload some screenshots of the early development state. This is how I began developing the game :)

[pocketdefender-blog]

tweaked the trail of the player rockets, fixed some bugs...

[pocketdefender-blog]

Locking works - in principle. The graphics are still temporary and anything but final. Still have to judge if it's too mighty or not...

[pocketdefender-blog]

Testing how the locking feels like. The timing seems plausible - it depends on the accuracy of aiming: The better the aim, the quicker the lock on happens. I think this could enable special enemies that are very good at evading rockets...

Now I need the code to make the flying rocket following its target.

[pocketdefender-blog]

I'm working on a smart missile upgrade where the missile can lock on targets. However, the lock on must happen by aiming with the missile steadily at the target. I'm not sure if this'll work out. 

What is visible in the animation is how it basically would work with the aiming. It's gonna be a lot of trial and error I think.

[pocketdefender-blog]

Showing stats in game, added some animations to transition between the categories.

[pocketdefender-blog]

  Added a new feature to the particle system  that I am working on for Actionscript  using Stage3d: additive color factors. The animated gif shows how the additive color effect allows giving the particles a white color at the end of their lifetime. The color can be chosen freely of course. For clarification: Only one single texture sprite is used for drawing the particles (RGB+Alpha). A majority of items on my feature list is implemented by now

Linear velocity and gravity, influenced by motion drag

Multiplicative color influence

Additive color influence

Size influence

Rotation speed and drag factor influence

The system still qualifies the requirements I had for the rewrite regarding the performance, important for mobile systems:

Lightweight particles (76 bytes - 19 floats)

Simulation entirely done on the GPU

Two drawcalls at most

Remaining features are:

wind influence

emitter system

cpu based particle death detection

Spawning particles on top or bottom of the existing particles

Limitation (that I am not happy with):

Currently 15 vectors are used as particle type parameters; This limits the particle simulation to about 8 distinct particle types in one system. Could be countered with more heavyweight particles that carry more information on their own - which would enable more versatile usages. 

Difficult to extend since it's AGAL...

[pocketdefender-blog]

The TV screen ui implements two interfaces right now: The stats and the upgrade menu. Currently I am trying to make the stats more appealing and actually useful.