Rain of Destruction:
Controls :
Left = Move Left
Right = Move Right
Spacebar = Fire

Cheat: type in "thor" while playing for a cheatcode used in the development of the demo to help ease the process

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Rain of Destruction was going to be great. Unfortunately like many of my legacy projects, it was exciting to start, but not nearly as ambitious as i wanted it to be. So when the interest and opportunity to do something oh so much bigger and better, it leaves little interest for past things.

Truth be told, the second level was finished, first level was polished, and i began making promotional shots. Alas, this jsut didn;t pan out and the gameplay got a bit stale due to the very limiting way it was programmed.

Ive said alot of bullshit in my day to make myself appear smarter or better than i actually was. I deleted the old comments out of here because they were an embarrassment to me, and to Black Jaguar Studios.

Rain of Destruction started off and ended as a High School Information Technology Project. It was to be a joint collaboration between a few students, though anticipating that i would do most if nto all the work anyways (yes i was fully prepared for that). The project hit back ni grade 11 to make a flash movie. Because i was deeply interested in scripting at the time, it was only natural to challenge myself and make a game. So i started work immediately on some documentation behind this project.
My actionscripting skills were primitive at best.

Imagine a bowl of noodles. Now throw in some coleslaw, and then put a blender to it for roughly 4 seconds.
Thats how the code looked in this project.

To create a level, required me to utilize the main timeline and various layers, to place enemy ships. One of my goals was to drag and drop from my library and need no longer worry about them. This unfortunately couldn;t be the case, each enemy had specific collision detection and movement code, as well as very basic random() AI. I would set these up as waves of enemies, adn each time an enemy went past you, it would respawn above you and come back down again. After each wave was completed i hand hard-coded a refresher of the IDs and Values to save performance. Oh yeah, having fired hundreds and hundreds of shots, slowed down performance on old 300MHz computers. Each shot had to have its own incremented ID in order to work. Dumb? yeah i know.
So after working out 7-8 waves or whatever, time was crunchign and i needed to finish thsi level, shoddy collision detection methods and all. So i whipped up a boss, programmed in very traditional boss battle AI (somethign i called "Random Patterns" to try and keep the user guessing) andtried my hardest to balance out the boss fight so it was doable, but fairly hard, and dealing with one life is often frustrating to most.

The graphics were a mixed bag of tricks. The stars and text are all hand animated in the flash client itself, and the player ship was modeled in Swift3D v.2, shoddily rendered out in 2 states "Normal" and "Tilted". I just had to mirror the tilt graphic in Flash for the 3rd state for Tilting in the opposite direction.
Yet, the boss was drawn in Flash, but half the enemies were drawn in Photoshop.

The shot, was even lazily done. The path the shot you fire goes in, is actually hand animated by me, as i was unaware of how to move objects via programming outside of keyboard controls. This leant to some VERY interesting bugs as the bounding box liked to stretch back in the day, instead of move with the graphics.
Fun times.

All in all, it was a fun ride designing and developing this title. The end product is a hastily worked together pile of crap internally, but i tried to make it look like something special on the outside, and its FUN. And thats all that realy matters right?

Thanks for reading this!

Cheers

Kyle Harrison