Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Refactoring and New Tweaks

Not a whole lot to report lately. I did a significant amount of refactoring over the past weekend however. Refactoring, by definition results in no real change in the way the client interacts with the code base. As such, the game seems to work in the same way it did before the refactoring, except behind the scenes it is now much more encapsulated after I pulled out a lot of the minion functionality out of the EnemyMinion class and into minion specific classes like Sprayer and and Exploder.

Though it isn't really significant, I made a minor tweak to the way the Boomerang class minion shoots. Previously it would shoot a bullet down that would make a U-Turn to the right side of the screen and then would proceed back up and off the screen. After my little change, there is now a 50/50 chance that the bullet will either U-Turn towards the left side of the screen rather than the right. Very minor tweak but it make the boomerang bullets a little less predictable as before you could just dodge to the left and not have to worry about the return hit.

That's all for now, but I've determined that in the platformer game, the levels need to be significantly more dangerous. At this point it seems far too easy to outrun the lava for long periods of time, and the lava pits aren't all that hard to avoid. It needs to be more of a challenge, but I'm still not sure what obstacles I could add to make it harder. Maybe something like a counterpart of the lava pit but on the ceiling so you can't jump too high. I'll have to keep thinking about that one.