Discuss game theme

[angus-lherrou]

From @b-sharman in #3:

I propose that we hold a discussion about what sort of theme the game will have (spaceships? animals? airplanes? gardening?) and use that information to decide whether to add any sort of velocity decay.

We can discuss that here.

[b-sharman]

I think the game would be funner with more player-to-player interaction. Although I've never played multiplayer before (as it's not yet implemented), I imagine in the current state of the game, players would mostly be focusing on trying to get gems for themselves, zoning out the multiplayer aspect. To address this, I was considering adding some sort of system in which players could steal gems from each other, or creating some sort of projectile weapon that causes players to drop a gem.

All that goes to say that such a mechanism could be a factor in which theme we choose.

[angus-lherrou]

I like the projectile idea. Sounds perfectly chaotic with the lag.

[b-sharman]

It sounds fun to me too, but how would a player aim it?

[angus-lherrou]

We could have the projectile fire in the direction the player is facing. Whether we take that to be thrust or velocity is up to us, I suppose. Using thrust only allows for 8-directional firing, but allows for more rapid and therefore more versatile aiming, whereas using velocity is slower but perhaps more accurate. I guess if we wanted to be really smart we could choose some linear combination of the two to account for the acceleration of the projectile before it leaves the figurative barrel--a bullet fired in the direction of movement would move faster than one fired in the opposite direction. But maybe that wouldn't feel right for a simple sprite game.

Not that accuracy is that important when you only know where your opponent was 1000 ms ago.

[b-sharman]

I've pushed a basic implementation of that to the projectiles branch, but I feel that until we can test with multiple human players, there's not much point in deciding whether the projectile is fired according to thrust or velocity.

I think it would be a good idea to create a whole new issue for this if we want to discuss it further.