[post mortem] virus - a drawing API game

[nGFX]

Virus was one of my entries to the great mousebreaker comp.
virus on mousebreaker

The idea to virus came from some experiments with the flash drawing API, a font plotter I've written for some other game and a line plotter (which is used by the font plotter) and the wish to do something keyboard only controlled (verrry retro).

Optics were mainly inspired by the c64 look of elite (and I must admit I took a great deal of inspiration of elite's planet creation routines, too)

The idea is simple, using asteroids like movement and a set of baddies: just kill them. So the enemies should have some sort of AI to them in order to make them more interesting.
As this never was meant as a "big" game - the MB comp forced me to finish it and add some depth (not much).

There are just 3 enemy types:
simple android, they just move from one sector of the screen to another, if the player comes in range they fire at the player and fly towards him. Androids may become trackers if a tracker gets killed.

tracker, they actively try to find a way to the player and shoot at him. Trackers also drop mines which can be shot in order to set the secondary weapon. (nasty little buggers they are)

factory, they appear when too many androids have been killed and spawn 2 "super mines" which turn into androids after a while.

All graphics, including the 3d-ish clip arts on the menu screens and the (very basic) ingame animations are drawn from a set of coordinates, I first wanted to store them in an external xml file but was to lazy to do so in the end. So currently they are stored as array inside the main swf. The player sprite for instance looks like this:
aPlayer = [[100, 0], [80, 30], [100, 50], [50, 150], [20, 50], [30, 180], [50, 150], [150, 200], [100, 50], [150, 150], [180, 50], [170, 180], [150, 150], [50, 200], [100, 50], [120, 30], [100, 0]];

The arrays were created using a very, very, very unusable editor I wrote, but still better than doing it by hand, isn't it?
virus gfx ed

Paste this into the textbox and click "read" on the right side, afterwards just click on "preview"...

aData[0] = [[26, 95], [126, 151], [223, 182], [311, 100], [300, 48], [492, 191], [311, 100], [396, 309], [445, 351], [489, 432], [393, 413], [382, 365], [382, 358], [161, 279], [201, 420], [26, 95], [70, 188], [201, 420]];
aData[1] = [[126, 151], [388, 338], [387, 333], [391, 307], [396, 309], [391, 307], [489, 432], [393, 413], [391, 307], [387, 333], [388, 338], [387, 359], [382, 358], [387, 359], [387, 355], [149, 235], [161, 279], [126, 151], [186, 199], [144, 217], [186, 199], [386, 338]];
aData[2] = [[300, 48], [301, 109], [311, 100], [320, 122], [492, 191]];
aData[3] = [[223, 182], [387, 333]];

The biggest piece of virus is the sound, the androids doing some "paradroid"-ish kind of communication (they really do make some noise when they exchange data ). The speech was done with "Sam Reciter" and afterwards noised up in audacity.

Some stats:
- 140k as2 code (including gfx), 14 classes
- 100k for background and logo images
- 392k sound and music
- about 50h coding work
- some 10h sound
- some 5h testing and debugging
- 3L sweat and tears because of flash 32k per class problem
- 20L tea and/or coffee
- some bottles of beer to forget about that game on weekends
- some sheets of paper for sketches and notes (mainly ToDos)
- endless lines of curses and bad words for flash, my coding and the world in general

Thanks to Squize playing and feedback.

nGFX.

ps: No bitmap sprites were harmed during the creation of this game. No pngs are abused during gameplay. All lines were over 18 at the time of the creation, records are kept for verification.