Stupendous Source Of Fire - alpha4

Wizards fight each other in different arenas using exploding fireballs, bouncing lightning bolts, target-locking magic missiles and magic swords that deflect spells.

This game is in very beginning stages. It did take me long to reach it's current state, but a good part of the code is already well-structured enough to allow me to evolve the game to the next stages quicker.

Long-term wishlist (I may or may not start working on those for the next release already):

• Bots.
• Decoupling world updates and screen updates.
• Decoupling drawing from absolute positions so that the game may work exactly in the same way in different resolutions.
• Networking.
• Inclusion of powerups.
• A non-hideous UI.
• Complete control customization.
• More project members.

Changes:

• The game has evolved yet further. Now the game accepts keyboard control too and the game no longer crashes if joysticks aren't present. Whenever present, joysticks are the default controllers.
• The game now announces the player's victory after enough mages are defeated. I decided to allow a slack of a few seconds before announcing the victor so that ties can happen. =)
• Up to 4 players can play at the same time now. I don't think I'll extend the number of players since the maps are quite small and I don't feel like scrolling belongs in this game. I have tested the game once with 3 players and there's enough chaos under these conditions. ;) For the moment it is necessary to have joysticks to have more than 2 players playing at once.
• Unannounced, but present since alpha3: the sword now also may be used to cause damage.

Known issues:

• The user interface looks very horrible. And that is not necessarily intentional.
• The game doesn't prevent you from trying to assign the same controller to more than one player. Under such conditions, the game behaves oddly.
• In an attempt to prevent the new release from taking too long, I ended up adding lots of hideous code to the game. These must be reviewed and cleaned in future editions.
• The sword hits everything around the mage, it should hit only stuff in front of the mage. It's not a bug, but rather a feature caused by programmer laziness.

Planned for alpha5:

• "Some" code cleanup.
• Improved graphics and effects (volunteers are welcome to the project!).
• Small game physics improvement.