Pre Triangle Game Jam, May 2008

The Triangle Game Jam 2008 starts tomorrow! It'll be quite exciting. This is the second Triangle Game Jam, we did one last summer as well. There, Mike Daly and I made Shape Slasher:


Mike had the idea to cut up shapes and try to score the result based on how nice of a triangle it was. We decided that the size of the triangle shouldn't matter, just how close it was to an equilateral triangle. Mike wrote some scoring code for triangle shapes, and I wrote a definition of n-gons and code to cut them. We decided to always have convex shapes.

Things turned out well, Mike made some procedural level generation code with different shape size, irregularity complexity, and speeds. I dressed up the graphics a bit, worked on the code for cutting and movement, etc.

We added special bonus rounds as well, so gamplay alternates between levels with moving random pieces, and bonus rounds with shapes that start off still. Your job is to quickly decide how to cut and collect as many triangles as possible in a limited amount of time.

The game turned out to be pretty fun, and we had a good difficulty curve over the duration of several levels. The final stage is quite challenging, and the last bonus stage is a rare treat. ;)

Since the first game jam, spending a lot of energy getting used to XNA and C#, we've gotten faster and continued to use XNA.