Saturday, November 30, 2013

More Refactoring and Progress Meter Fix

Haven't been doing much lately that is interesting gameplay wise. Just some more refactoring of my vertical scrolling arcade shooter. Previously I was setting up all my textures for minions in my main game class but after the refactor the texture code for each individual minion is now in the minion class itself. Additionally, I made it so all my minions are set in a certain size since I never ended up making them different sizes anyway. As a result, my constructors for my minions have shrunk significantly in number of arguments required and everything is getting even more self contained. I've also been going through all of my classes and fixing some naming conventions that I had used when first starting the project that I'm no longer particularly fond of. Again, as this is a refactor, a person playing the game would not actually notice anything different about the game.

One thing I've done that isn't a refactor, however, is to fix the level progress meter on the side of the screen. The way it was setup originally was never really great, but it was close enough for what I originally wanted it to do. After I changed up the levels a while back to include waves that were a mix of the two minions of the level, the progress meter code broke down. Yesterday I looked into it for 15 minutes or so and now the progress meter is working even better than it was before it was broken, so I'm pretty happy with the outcome there.

Besides more refactoring and minor performance tweaks, the scrolling shooter is basically how I want it to be now. I just need to get some in-app purchasing going, but for weird Google related reasons, I can't really test any of this stuff without a new test phone. Conveniently though, I'll be getting a new phone soon, so I can do a factory reset on my current one and use that for testing, so I'm pretty excited about that. Once the in-app billing stuff is taken care of, I can start looking around for artists that might be interested in working on the game. I'm a little worried that people might not be into it though as it seems like a very large project with a bunch of animated sprites. Over 20 different minion types that all need to have animations. That seems like a pretty daunting task, but I'm hoping to find somebody who is up to the task because I think its a fun game already and when it looks good as well, it will be really solid.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Fire Geysers

I've been a little bugged with my platformer game recently because the lava pits are generally too easy to jump over, and the lava wave is far too easy to avoid. To make things a little harder, I started the lava at a slightly faster speed and additionally I have its speed ramp up faster.

I also have added a new obstacle to the game: the Fire Geyser. This obstacle is a little mound on the ground that spits flames that will kill the player if they touch them. As a warning, the geyser shoots out a puff of smoke twice, then the flames shoot out. The smoke doesn't hurt you, but simply serves as an indicator that the flames are coming. It repeats on this cycle in a loop. Some times you need to run back and forth to wait out the flames, and since you cant actually stop running the closest thing to standing still is switching direction fast enough that you don't really go anywhere. Here are some pictures of the Fire Geyser in action: