I’m furiously working on iShoot 2.0 and figured you might want a peek at what’s in store. The first huge change is unfortunately hard to take a screenshot of, but you should notice a change on the title screen:
I’ve mostly been working on the networking code so far, rather than the user interface for it, so I’m not going to show off the placeholder interface I have now. But basically the way it will work is one person chooses Host, up to three other people choose Connect and select the host, and then you lob expensive weapons at each other. You’ll love it. For this version you’ll all have to be on the same WiFi network, but I’m planning on allowing you to fight anyone in the world before long.
The next big change is heralded by a new, unassuming button on the New Game screen:
Edit Rules? Whatever can that be? Click on it and you’ll see this:
These should be pretty self-explanatory. Economy, for instance, allows you to change the amount of money you get at the beginning of each round and for killing enemy tanks and such. Basic Rules currently (keep in mind this is an alpha…) looks like this:
Landscapes allows you to disable landscapes you don’t like, and (when I’m done with it…) to control the frequency of the randomly-generated landscapes:
The most exciting part of the Rule Editor is by far the Weapon Editor, which will allow you to add, delete, and edit weapons. The weapons in iShoot are built up of simple parts with tunable settings; it shouldn’t surprise you that the Tactical Nuke, Nuke, and Planet Buster are all the same weapon with different blast radius and damage settings. But what may surprise you more is that the Claymore and Meltdown are the same weapon as well — they are both “ground bursts”, weapons which explode into a cloud of submunitions at the point of impact.
The main difference is that the Meltdown has a “burst power” of zero, meaning that its submunitions do not spread from the point of impact at all. This means that when the Meltdown strikes a target, it “explodes” and spawns twelve other rockets… which look exactly like a Meltdown and continue following the same trajectory. As each rocket strikes, it explodes and cuts a hole in the dirt allowing the remaining rockets to continue traveling. But since the rockets are all at the exact same position, it looks like there is a single rocket slicing its way through the ground.
The reason I’m explaining all of this is to give you a sense of the cool weapons you can create using iShoot’s weapon system. By combining the existing weapon classes (shells, cluster bombs, ground bursts, etc.) in new and different ways, you can come up with some very creative effects. When I decided to create the Shiva Bomb to bring the number of weapons up to an even 25, it took all of two minutes and zero lines of code. The Shiva Bomb is just a Ground Burst weapon whose submunitions are themselves Ground Bursts. With the new weapon editor in iShoot 2.0, you’ll be able to harness all of this power for yourself, creating awesome new weapons to terrorize your opponents.
And yes… you’ll be able to use your newly created weapons in WiFi play. The host selects the rules which are in effect, so choose your friends wisely.
The weapon editor is still very much a work in progress, but I’ll leave you with two things. First, a teaser screenshot:
And secondly, a few sample weapons that you will be able to create:
- The “Great Wall” weapon is a “skylance”, a weapon which creates a vertical beam of destruction on impact. It just has its damage set to zero and the “create dirt” option checked, so it instead creates a wall of dirt. You can now create damaging skylances, or better yet a cluster bomb which releases submunitions that explode into skylances when they strike the ground.
- It is possible to select from different types of shells randomly. For example, you could have a “World Reshaper” weapon which creates a huge blast of half Excavators and half Dirt Balls.
- Again using random submunitions, you could create a “Jackpot” weapon which has a 75% chance of doing no damage and a 25% chance of being incredibly powerful.
- I’m a fan of a little weapon I put together called the “Disco Bomb”, in which its submunitions explode into randomly-colored explosions. Just a little bit more visual flair :-).
So, there you have it. You wanted online, you got it. You wanted more weapons… well, you got more than you asked for there :-). Just be patient, iShoot 2.0 is coming, and it’s awesome.
