Colonel Panic
(2020)
TGA Project 3
This is the first project we made entirely in C++. It sure was a challenge, but I'd say we pulled it off with flying colours. Making this game was a blast, some of the most fun I've ever had making a game. I was a gameplay programmer on this project, and my favourite part was the boid controls. This gif is a li'l showcase of that feature. Naturally it's all tweakable with sliders and stuff.
Making boids behave is never easy, but with a lot of tweaking and a lot of little changes and cheats, I got it to feel good and serve its gameplay purpose. Below you can see the some of the iterations that I went through in order to makethe little boid drones feel responsive and smooth.
Here's some of the boid code. The crux was to make the circle into an ellipse, and that was done by multiplying the distance with some dimensions to fake an eliptical border. The dimensions are decided by player input, becoming wider as the swarm is moved upwards or to the sides.
In the end, the unique main mechanic was something we got a lot of praise for, and I'm very happy with how it turned out