Shields and Slimes

Well, I got a lot of what I mentioned in my previous post completed. When the player takes a hit, the phone vibrates for something like .125 seconds (oddly, fractions of a second longer felt like it was too long). In addition, when the player takes damage, their sprite will now flash red for a split second as further feedback that they were hit. In the screenshot below, the player sprite is flashing red because it has just collided with an enemy minion.

 I also implemented the shield feature I wanted to get in there. Minions now have a chance to drop the shield powerup, and should they player collect it, they are rewarded with 5 seconds of invulnerability where colliding with enemy sprites will not damage them, but will also not hurt the enemy minion (it will however remove enemy bullets from the screen). If the player collides with a boss, they will be given a similar shield that only lasts 2 seconds, but gives them enough time to reposition their sprite where they won't be hit by the boss again. In the screenshot below, you can see the dashed oval of the shield around the player sprite, along with some new minion types that I will be getting to.

I've added another level to the game. This one is composed of squirmy black slime creatures. The two minion classes for these guys are "splitter" and "exploder". The splitters are the ones shown in the screenshot above. When you shoot them, they split into two smaller versions of themselves (designated as "splits") that must also be destroyed to advance. These guys don't shoot to much because the number of enemy bullets can get quite overwhelming to deal with when you have a bunch of splits swirling around. The second class of minion for this level is the exploder. In my temporary paint graphics, they look like black squids, as you can see in the screenshot below. These guys explode when they are killed, releasing 3 bullets out , so if you kill a wave of them in quick succession you have to deal with a wall of bullets coming down towards you.

For my next level, I'm going to try to make some ghost type minions. I'm not sure what their unique little deal is going to be yet, but at least one of the types will go invisible or transparent. I'm learning a lot about AndEngines various modifiers with this project and I think I will be able to do some cool ghost stuff with the AlphaModifier. I also need to start thinking about making a level select menu page now that I'm starting to get more and more levels going. I rigged the menu button on the device to skip you to the next level but I'm going to need a level select menu eventually anyway, so I might start playing around with that soon. I have some interesting boss ideas so I'm looking forward to implementing those as well. Still a long way to go, but the project seems pretty promising so far.