Rob C, Making FoxPro Misbehave

There has been rather a lot of progress since my last update. What started as another experiment in seeing how far I could push Visual FoxPro is beginning to develop some actual game systems — and, more importantly, some decisions for the player to make. The asteroid field has had a lot of work. The … Read more

A few days ago, I was genuinely wondering whether I had pushed Visual FoxPro too far. I had created an enormous, highly detailed mothership that filled most of the screen. It looked impressive standing still, but the moment smaller ships flew across it, everything flickered horribly. For an arcade game, that was a fairly fundamental … Read more

I keep saying this, but Galactic Gladiators is starting to feel like a proper game now. Not just a collection of Visual FoxPro experiments that happen to move around the screen. The different bits are beginning to join together and affect each other. The asteroid field now has eight large asteroids, harmless smaller rocks, salvage … Read more

I only intended to add a few more effects to my Visual FoxPro experiment. Tonight I added a boost button. Nat said the ship needed a way of nipping out of trouble, and she was right. The boost makes the ship much quicker, gives the controller a gentle rumble and burns through fuel at a … Read more

Tonight I was supposed to be working on Level 1. Instead, I ended up obsessing over what happens to the background music when the player’s ship explodes. This is becoming something of a pattern. Galactic Gladiators now has a second piece of music for the asteroid field. It has the same general musical character as … Read more

I thought I was adding some asteroids to Galactic Gladiators. That was genuinely all this was supposed to be. The player would fly through a few rocks, avoid hitting them and then move on to whatever came next. It sounded like quite a small thing to add. It wasn’t. The first asteroid looked good, but … Read more

One of Tom’s suggestions for Galactic Gladiators was that the alien shouldn’t just suddenly appear on the screen. It should arrive through some sort of portal. At the time, I had no idea how I was going to do that in Visual FoxPro. Then I created the particle effect for the player’s explosion and realised … Read more

When the player died in Defender, the ship seemed to completely disintegrate. It wasn’t just an explosion graphic being shown for a few frames. Lots of individual pieces flew out across the screen. So I thought I would see if Visual FoxPro could do something similar. The first attempt uses 80 tiny FoxPro shape controls. … Read more

The latest slightly ridiculous experiment in Galactic Gladiators is screen shake. When the player’s ship is hit, the whole game moves around by a few pixels before returning to where it started. It is actually quite a subtle effect, but once it is there you can definitely feel the difference. The collision suddenly has a … Read more

One of the things I’m enjoying most about writing Galactic Gladiators in Visual FoxPro is discovering things that make me stop and think: “Hang on… FoxPro can do that?” The latest one started with BARF. BARF is the alien who appears on screen and communicates with the player. I’d already been playing around with animating … Read more