Having just finished Finger Stretching Sokoban, I took a few weeks off to enjoy a non-project lull in my free time. But the call of game development is inevitable, and so here we are.

During that "time off" I definitely floated quite a few ideas - both old and new - through my head. Eventually I settled on wanting to work on something inspired by Desert Strike. After some thought about how much artwork would be needed, and my own talent level in that area, I shifted the goalposts slightly to where I'm now aiming to make a 3D game in the vein of Star Wars: Rogue Squadron (N64). The benefit to switching to 3D is that I'm capable of achieving the lower-poly modeling and art required of something in the ever-chunky Nintendo 64 style. The big downside is my relative unfamiliarity with 3D game programming.

I spent some time looking at footage and extracted content from N64 games; Rogue Squadron, Blast Corp, DK Racing, X-treme G, etc. While I've not decided how deep into the N64 style I'm going to go, I've definitely decided to lean on the aesthetic as a starting point for many aspects of the game. Anyway, as a result, we now have a newly active WIP project!

Project Pinball Polka

Of course, this is just a temporary name - randomly pulled from an alliterative random phrase generator - until I decide on a final name later on.

Status

It's still pretty early, so nothing worth showing yet, but here's whats done so far:

1. Spent a bunch of time preparing for actual development by putting together design plans and set up a board for my tasks.
2. As the title says, I got the Initial Commit popped in with the start of the project structure loaded into Git(hub)
3. Created a prototype of a generic vehicle, and Player/AI Controllers to attach
   1. The goal is to have the same vehicles able to be controlled by players or AI. To do this, I've structured the code so the vehicle has a generic "receive input" API. This means I just have to hook up one of the two (or more?) controller types and the vehicle doesn't care either way. The player can send input, or an AI, and the vehicle acts accordingly.
4. Added a straightforward interpolated Camera class that snaps to and follows the "target" vehicle controlled by the player.