Well, damn. It's been a while. Haven't done anything Click-related since making a level for Jon Smeby's Teh Forum Game. So, I was lurking on the Clickteam forums, I saw that Multimedia Fusion 2 had an honest-to-goodness physics engine implemented for it. I then remembered a game idea I had around the time of Tigsource's B-game competition: Marionette UFO.
My initial vision was to make a side-scrolling game based off of those old B-movies where the spacecraft were hanging off of a rod by strings, where the player would directly control the rod to move the spacecraft. I spent a couple nights learning the physics engine and refamiliarizing myself with MMF2 before making a quick engine test minigame.
I'm pretty sure I'm not ready to move on from this point. First off, I'm trying to find a decent balance between the indirection offered by controlling the stick and the responsiveness of direct controls. I guess what I could do is to shorten the string length to make it more responsive or increase the air resistance to lower the pendulum effect. Also, this build uses rigid strings, which means the player could easily support the weight in the air from below. I'm not entirely sure *why* that doesn't appeal to me, possibly just aesthetics. Regardless, the physics engine doesn't seem to support fluid joints, and my attempts to simulate them by a series of rigid joints connecting negligible mass bodies resulted in an unplayable mess. Perhaps the solution would just be to make sure that the top rows don't have any less chance of containing an obstacle than the bottom. Also, it's fairly easy to push the spacecraft offscreen in the corners, which I've implemented an ugly stopgap solution of physically limiting the x/y coordinates of the weight. I'm not entirely sure whether the problem is with the physics engine, the extension developer's implementation of it, or my implementation of the extension. I was also thinking of making this mouse controlled (click + drag to move the stick, click + drag on the ends of the stick to move and rotate), but decided to use keyboard controls for now before worrying about how the physics engine might break down at those potentially higher speeds.
Anyway, I'm looking for feedback on the movement system of this game. You use the arrow keys to move the stick, and z/x to rotate it. A UFO (a gray square at the moment) hangs from the stick by two parallel strings. There are two minigames to test out the movement. The first one's goal is to make sure no diamonds collide with the UFO, and int the second one the diamonds cut the strings but the stick collides with them. I'm more interested in feedback on the movement system, but I realize that trying to make these minigames fun would be a good start towards seeing if a larger project with this engine would be good.
Download Link: http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/MarionetteUFOTest.exe (503 kb)
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