No Weapons Side Scroller #1 During a session of habitual lurking, I stumbled across the most recent Gamedev Challenge; which is to build a side-scrolling shoot-em-up which cannot include any traditional weaponry. I've been looking for something concrete to get me motivated into actually finishing something and as I don't have much of an imagination, this was the perfect opportunity. In terms of mechanics, I'm going to try and put together a couple of gameplay prototypes this week but my current thinking is around some kind of grappling system. Perhaps grabbing objects or enemies and using them as projectiles. Another possibility is the player tethering to enemies and discharging electricity to cause damage. You could tether to multiple enemies and deliver a reduced shock or a single enemy and deliver the full energy causing more damage. I'm not sure how I could make that 'fast-paced' though. Maybe a mixture of the two could work. I was originally going to use Java and lwjgl but am put off by how large the distribution would need to be (game binary + JVM is probably required to run reliably). So I'm going to dust off my C++ knowledge and give it a go with SDL. https://ift.tt/eA8V8J

During a session of habitual lurking, I stumbled across the most recent Gamedev Challenge; which is to build a side-scrolling shoot-em-up which cannot include any traditional weaponry. I've been looking for something concrete to get me motivated into actually finishing something and as I don't have much of an imagination, this was the perfect opportunity. In terms of mechanics, I'm going to try and put together a couple of gameplay prototypes this week but my current thinking is around some kind of grappling system. Perhaps grabbing objects or enemies and using them as projectiles. Another possibility is the player tethering to enemies and discharging electricity to cause damage. You could tether to multiple enemies and deliver a reduced shock or a single enemy and deliver the full energy causing more damage. I'm not sure how I could make that 'fast-paced' though. Maybe a mixture of the two could work. I was originally going to use Java and lwjgl but am put off by how large the distribution would need to be (game binary + JVM is probably required to run reliably). So I'm going to dust off my C++ knowledge and give it a go with SDL.

from GameDev.net http://bit.ly/2UCGi1S