Well, I did one of those Game-in-a-Day things this weekend. The game is called Ball Blast and it uses the Torque engine. It is something of a simultaneous turn-based action/puzzle game. I like Torque - I was able to build this in just a day using it.

I created a short journal and also a few screen shots as I was developing the game. My goal was to try and create a game with a very simple interface that also had some strategic depth. You play the actual game part without having to push the mouse buttons - just move the mouse around. Not sure if it will have strategic depth (or be fun) yet - have to wait until I get multi-player in the there and make some real levels.

Click here for the Ball Blast web site.

I spent about half a day getting the basic menu flow in place and also modifying the client/server code to handle a simultaneous turn based game. All the clients have 4 seconds to decide upon a move and then the server passes all client moves to all other clients and they are then executed on the same tick.

The other half day was spent working on putting in artwork for the scoring, working on some timing issues, fixing some bugs, automatically advancing through rounds/levels, and creating a few very basic levels. It still needs a lot of work and polish, but the basic structure is there.

I built the demo install with NullSoft this evening. I have never used it before, but I was able to get a demo build created fairly quickly with it. A very good install program - especially since it is free.

Ball Blast will be up to 4 players over the internet. All games will have 4 players and computer AI will stand in if there are less than 4 human players. It will also be single player with 3 computer opponents. The AI for the computer opponents right now is two calls to Random() to create a vector. They are not very smart. Once I hook up a server joining window the multi-player should work.

Click here for the Ball Blast Demo.

Remember, no multi-player yet in the demo and very dumb computer opponents, but you can tell where the game will be heading. I think it will be fun with 4 real humans blasting the balls around. Now I need to get Minigolf Blast finaled. Getting close...

Here is a screen shot from earlier this afternoon when I was just starting to get the gameplay going: