Concluding Remarks

This is it! After a few hundreds of lines only, you have implemented your own game! Congratulations! I hope that you enjoyed this project as much as I did when preparing it (I sometimes even prefer programming games to game playing). But it can get rather time consuming, as you always want to add new ideas to your game.

To NOT do

This section gathers several crazy ideas that I don’t want you to implement during the next two weeks, but I would love to see implemented by someone at some point in the future.

You could make it so that the map is circular, with a little planet in the center, and the gravity always moving you to that center (the Cartesian coordinates that the engine requires are probably not very adapted here).

The collision detection is one of the central problem in many games. I’m not sure that you have enough moving entities to mandate a complex solution such as Q-trees, but there is other approaches that you may want to try. The ground collision detection will also need improvements when you will add “islands” or concave spaces to your game.

AI is another big topic in games programming. How could the mankind avoid getting flattened by the lander while managing to get rescued? How should the enemies behave to make the game challenging but doable? Could you implement several difficulty levels, maybe? Programming an automated player is certainly possible, but it sounds like a lot of work.

Gameplay elements are also worth investigating, even if it’s less algorithmic (and thus less related to such a programing project). What kind of enemy behavior could you implement? The ground may be windy, or it may be some radioactive areas or other? Or your bullets may partially destroy the cave, that could partially collapse if you shoot too much? Maybe you prefer RPG games where you are rewarded for the guys that you save, in order to buy bigger and better ships? Or you prefer RTS games, where your guys the mine ore that gets transformed into metal and then ships by specific plants? What if you take ship heat into account, forbidding to use the motor too often, regardless of the remaining fuel amount?

As you can see, we could find enough extension ideas in that game to occupate a few years at least. This is the good thing when you program: there is always a nice thing that you could add to your pet project. Only your imagination is limiting. And time.

Your time is limited, so you’d better do just as I do: dream of these features, play with the idea, think about how it could possibly be done and mentally evaluate the alternatives. And then move on to something else such as speaking with friends and having fun outside, and forget about this little game ;)

If your idea is sooooo cool that you feel like you NEED to implement this, drop me an email so that we can consider together how cool this idea would be, add a paragraph to this page, and then move on to another project…