Welp. Time is up!
I can say that A. CYBORG now lets you fly around and slice stuff up a treat, and the art is not half bad. It doesn’t have a few things I’d originally hoped to slip in to the game, such as multiple enemy attack patterns, sounds, music, a boss, a special move, scoring, animated hair, any effect from letting hostile fire hit the heroine, or witty banter between her and her eccentric creator Dr. Grand-Mal. But then that’s video game development for you, I suppose: a few minor features will always fall by the wayside.
With regards to being “experimental gameplay” I’m going to decide that the point was for me to experiment with things — namely, drawing sprites — and I consider it a success in that respect. I do have some non-programming projects that need my attention for the next little while, but I’m going to consider the idea of perhaps spending a month or two sometime developing A. CYBORG further, from a tech demo into something worth genuinely calling a game. ‘Cos I have a few ideas. And I want to draw more sprites.
Please feel free to download the game from this link, unzip it someplace, and double-click on the obvious thing. If you do, let me know if it actually works — I’ve run it on my laptop, at least, but who knows what little detail I overlooked that might affect other Macs. And while you’re there, marvel at how I somehow managed to get XCode to build the least convenient, most out-of-date possible packaging for Mac users! Though I’m not going to accept all the blame, as 99% of the online docs, blogs, and forum posts are about creating IOS applications. I picture walking up to XCode 4 and stating that I’d like to use it to write a program for the Macintosh computer, and XCode just staring at me like a dog that’s been asked to balance a checkbook.
