Progress has been steady and on schedule so far:
Currently, there’s particles, and they follow the mouse cursor (or any attractors I define, the code is general)… It took me some measure of tweaking the parameters until I got something similar to the behavior I wanted… Ended up by defining the force applied to the particles as “force=delta_v/sqrt(dist)”, instead of the classical gravity-like “force=delta_v/sqr(dist)”… The particles are more reactive this way… Also added a “drag coeficient” to the particles, so they lose about 25% their energy each animation iteration… This will avoid them just shooting off screen in some fringe cases…
I can setup the attractors to affect only some colors (currently it’s just a RGB mask, but that might change).
Although it’s fun moving the particles around, I’m not sure if this will make an actually fun game… But to test that, I need to add the “level”, in a form of a maze of sorts… I expect I’ll have some other attractors and moving walls on that, but everything’s open at the moment…
I never thought how “minimal” is the complete opposite of what I usually think of in terms of game design (although I guess it’s a good way to design things: start with something big and subtract until you’re left with just some core mechanics, then you can add stuff back… I think it might avoid excessive padding in the game)…