
   SPEED: Simultaneous Projections Employing an Ensemble of Displays.

   Or alternatively: Stupid Pointless Effort at Establishing a Dumb Acronym.

   By Shawn Hargreaves, November 1999.


This program is my entry for the Allegro SpeedHack 1999, which was organized 
by Arron Shutt, and run over the weekend of November 27/28. The remainder of 
this file is a realtime log, with entries added chronologically during the 
course of the hack.

This code is free: do with it as you will.



10-26-1999, at 14:56
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I've written myself a makefile, and a script which ought to be able to send
this message to the website automatically. If you see this text, then it
worked!



10-26-1999, at 15:18
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Design doc:

Traditional Space Invaders type gameplay: aliens move down the screen, you 
move across the bottom firing upwards. Three lives. Your goal is to protect 
blocks underneath you, and you get score for having blocks left at the end 
of each attack wave. Alien motion will be as complex as I have time for, 
including Centipede style splitting.

This 2d action will be rendered in four different psuedo-3d viewports: 
normal flat mode, inside of a tube, outside of a large cylinder, and in 
spherical coordinates. Early attack waves use only one viewpoint, later ones 
tile multiple views of the same action, and toward the end of the sequence 
the views are overlaid (additive color). If you complete the sequence, it 
cycles but with vastly increased game speed.

When changing attack waves, views will slide around to their new locations 
(that should look pretty cool).

Any color depth, any resolution.

No time for drawing graphics, so everything will be simple vector art.

Bullets are surrounded by spining wireframe square, flightsim targetting 
style.

Explosions are expanding XLU circlefill, plus more rapidly expanding single 
circle shockwaves.

Wow, I think that is the most detailed formal game design that I have ever 
written! I don't have time for this, better get coding...



10-26-1999, at 17:37
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Basic game structure is in place: init code, commandline parsing, title 
screen, stupid little music bit at the end.



10-27-1999, at 10:21
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10:30 AM on saturday morning: just got out of bed and am ready to start some
serious work. Title and ending screens are finished, so it is just the game
itself left to be written!

