Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Deflector Shields and Lasers

Level 7 of my scrolling shooter game has laser satellite minions. The first type is the "waveshot" class. These minions shoot like other normal minions, except their bullets are wider, laser waves. Basically their bullets are just like the normal bullets in other levels, but rotated 90 degrees. The second minion class is the "reflector". These guys occasionally put up a laser shield in front of themselves and when a player bullet hits the shield, it is reflected back towards the player as an enemy bullet. The reflectors are pretty hard because they shoot their own bullets, plus reflect your own bullets back at you. It can get pretty hectic if there are a lot of reflectors going. Here are a couple screenshots of that level, still with one of my awful test backgrounds:

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Disc Golf and Lignting Bolts

I just recently released a new app called Disc Golf Cataloger. It's extremely similar to my previously released Nail Polish Cataloger, except that it is an app that I will actually use. Developing it also led to some cool new features in both the disc golf and the nail polish app. I added in some stuff people were asking for, like the ability to add notes to entries or sort by things like brand instead of just name. I also added some auto-backup things to make sure you don't lose your catalog. So, that's available now on Google Play:
Android app on Google Play

Now, on to details about Level 6 of my scrolling shooter. This one is a lightning themed level. I'm not 100% sure what the minions will be visually, but they are currently angry storm clouds in my programmer art version. It's very intense... Anyway, the first minion class is called the "Zigzag", because when they shoot their bullets, the bullets zigzag back and forth down the screen. They are actually pretty hard to dodge if there are more than just a few. The second minion class is boringly named the "Pauser" because when they fire a bullet, it pauses for a short duration at its origin point before quickly shooting down the screen. When there are multiple pausers flying around you end up getting this big section of lightning bullets that are just waiting at the top of the screen, and then they all swarm down on you. It's actually pretty cool, I'm just disappointed that I didn't use a better minion class name, but that isn't really important. Here are some pictures of my awful storm cloud minions with my terrible recolored test background that should illustrate just how little I cared about making the graphics for this level:
 So, that is level 6. I'm actually currently working on the last level since I finally came up with some minion ideas for it. Levels 7, 8, and 9 are already done so I will post about those in the future.