Dr. Dobbs' Singularity (Mattias Thell)

This Critic's Choice mod was developled by Mattias Thell. He explains:

"The game is a one button game in which you control a self flying space ship and can only modify the upward thrust. The twist (yes, 'standard' games are boring) is that you are not only constrained in flying one waybut you can change direction by flying through various 'hot spots' in the levels. I find this addition adds more depth to this genre.

There are ten levels in the game, with increasing difficulty, which you are still racing through to get the best time possible. Some levels contain short cuts, which can improve your time, but these are usually a lot more difficult to traverse.

Only five levels are unlocked when the game is started the first time and the rest need to be unlocked by earning medals. Medals are awarded when completing levels in a good enough time.

Here's what I changed:

The basic engine is, obviously, the pretty much the same but with a few modifications:

• Removed the characters. Dr. Dobb's Singularity is played as a single 'character', the space ship.
• Re-implemented the 'character' physics since since the old one didn't really fit.
• Added a few entities, such as more types of terrain and modifiers for the levels
• Threw away the collision code from the base and implemented my own using Separating Axis Theorem that utilizes a new class for keeping track of collision bounds. This was basically needed since I wanted the ship to be able to rotate and not be constrained by an AABB or to use pixel-perfect collisions.
• Removed all the AI entities since I had no use for them.
• Added alot of my own, programmer art(ish), sprites but I also kepts some of the old ones (like the explosion).
• Kept a few sound effects but also added some music (yay!)

General thoughts:

The base code was very easy to understand, which was great (Many thanks to the abundance of comments!)

The level system, while okay for small levels, did not really suit my game since I needed bigger levels and more sprite types. This resulted in a chaotic amount of characters potentially used in the level definition. I should probably have implemented an in game editor by I was too lazy."