Game in Progress: Nanopedes

I've started on a new game for Flashbynight.com, which I'll call Nanopedes. It's based on the classic centipede game, but with a twist, of course.



The first thing that I did was to see what other Flash adaptations of Centipede are out there and surprisingly there's not much. A quick 'digg' turned up this version which is faithful to the original, but seems to be too fast and why is the screen size so small?



http://www.thegameblazer.com/centipede.php



My idea was to have smoother motion, vector graphics and a 'lazy' kind of gameplay that casual gamers like. I thought I would call it 'nanopedes' and instead of one big centipede, I could have lots of small ones on the screen at the same time. Then I could play around and have different types of nanopedes in different colors with slightly different behaviors. When you level up, you meet different 'pedes and the speed increases. Sounds like fun and not too difficult to do. I estimate it will take me about ten hours to complete.



About 1 - 2 hours into the process, this is what I have:





http://www.flashbynight.com/nanopedes/nanopedes1.2.swf





So far, I have designed the 'hero' (but I think it needs redesigned), the basic nanopede and the mushrooms I got from a vector pack. I have done the movement of the hero (unfinished), added the ability to shoot 'lazy' bullets, the ability of the bullets to hit the mushrooms and hit the nanopede. I have put in the basic AI of the nanopede (unfinished), and I have designed a basic logo and into page.



So far, I think it's looking good. It has a nice feel to it and I'm happy with the speed and the playability. The only difficult bit is the movement of the nanopede around the mushrooms and the basics of that is done. And would you believe that it weighs in less than 7K?



I want to add some tutes to this blog, so I'll be posting snippets of code later. But that will have to wait for another day, since it's almost lunchtime!