Bullets and Power ups

I've added a decent amount of functionality to the scrolling shooter. First of all, there is a player "character" that is controlled by dragging your finger around the screen. The player sprite shoots a bullet every 1.5 seconds, so there is no need to tap a fire button or anything messy like that. The enemy sprites also shoot back now, and as a result there is a health meter depicting the player's current status. The first "level" currently in the game consists of waves that alternate between two minion types. The different types have different path patterns that they fly around in. As you get past waves, subsequent waves start having more minions in them. After something like 12 waves, the level is completed. Right now nothing happens at this point, minions just stop spawning. In the future, a boss character will appear. I'll be working on that soon.

I've also added power ups into the game. Currently there are only two types: health and bullet increase. There is a chance that either type will be spawned when an enemy minion is destroyed. As you might expect, collecting the health power up heals the player for one hit. Collecting the bullet increase power up increments the number of bullets the player shoots. By default the player shoots a single bullet straight forward. Collecting the power up will cause them to shoot two bullets away from them in a diagonal line. If the power up is collected a third time, they will shoot the two bullets at a diagonal as well as the straight forward bullet for a total of three bullets. The "3 Bullets" level is where it is capped. Picking up the power up after that won't do anything. However, taking a hit from an enemy minion will cause the bullet level to drop down one tier, with the default being the minimum. The health power up spawns less frequently than the bullet power up, but both of their drop rates will need some tweaking as it is too easy to stay at bullet level 3 and close to full health.

My next priorities are adding explosion animations when an enemy minion is killed, making some of the minion paths a little better, and then adding in a level boss when all the waves are cleared. Tia and I talked about putting a meter vertically along one side of the screen to show how close to the boss fight the player is, so I'm going to try to get working on that as well. Overall things are going good and the game is actually playable. Its easy to see that this game has a lot of potential, provided I can make the levels varied enough to keep it from going stale.

Enemy Minions

Been doing a little more work on the scrolling shooter lately. I cleaned up a little bit of the scrolling background code and it is now working fantastic. It was pretty good before, but if you changed the background enough times, the animation started to get choppy because the previous backgrounds weren't getting detached. That's all fixed up and its running smoothly.

In addition, I've started adding enemy sprites to the game. There is no player character yet, so the enemies, which I have dubbed "minions", go unopposed, but they fly around a bit while the background scrolls beneath them and it looks pretty cool. I read in the minion type and number for the wave from an xml file and then spawn the number of minions and send them out on a specific path to move along. Currently there is only one minion type, but that will change and the minions will have different paths depending on their designated type.

After I play around with the pathing a bit, I need to add a player ship so that you can actually fight the minions. I might make the minions shoot (at nothing) first. I'm not sure yet. So many options.

Puzzle Game and Scrolling Backgrounds

Been a while since I posted but I've got a little bit going on. Nearly a year after starting work on my puzzle game (and my first taste of AndEngine) I finally feel like it is ready for release. It still needs good graphics (the ones I made are terrible MS Paint things) and some sound effects to go with the new graphics. Other than that, all the functionality is there, Scoreloop leaderboards for the 5 game modes, a cool power-up I added, and some pretty cool achievements to earn by doing specific things and playing the additional game modes. I'm pretty excited about how far the game has come. It is somewhat similar to games like Bejeweled so fans of that type of game will enjoy it, but at the same time has elements that make it unlike any puzzle game I've personally seen. I'm pretty happy with how original of a concept it is.

The other project I've just started recently is a top down, vertical scrolling shooter. I haven't done much work on the actual code yet, but Tia and I have spent quite a bit of time hashing out things like characters, a little bit of the storyline, bosses, power-ups, and some of the general look of the game. Going only off of the notes I have in my notebook and the images I have in my head, its looking pretty great.

With this game I'm trying to do a significantly better job of encapsulating code, and I'm off to a pretty good start with the very little I've done so far. I'm starting with the aspects of AndEngine I'm unfamiliar with in an attempt to figure them out before there is a lot of other pieces fit in. So far I've just scratched the surface with some Parallax Background work. Basically a parallax background is set up so you have a main background that slowly scrolls, and then another background layer composed of background objects like clouds, that move at a slightly faster rate, giving a "realistic" appearance to the background. Since the player in this new game will be flying at what is presumably a great height, the ground should appear to be moving underneath them at a slower rate than the closer objects, like the clouds, and then both backgrounds continuously scroll on repeat. AndEngine has a nice Parallax Background class, but for some reason the official stuff only supports horizontal scrolling (not good for a vertical scrolling shooter). Luckily, a quick search of the AndEngine forums turned up some modified code some community members had worked on that fix the issue.

So, I started out by just having a light blue background with a big black X on it so I could tell if it was moving. For the foreground I put some oddly colored triangles pointing out. I don't know why I went with that decision, but it worked out all right. This is what it looks like:

Then, partially to test out my encapsulated background code but more to have a better example of the reasoning behind the parallax background, I made a second set of background that are clouds over a grassy area with a lake, some streams, and what I guess is a road leading up to the lake, again in MS Paint. It turned out surprisingly good for the time I put in:

This second background really illustrates what I'm going for here. The clouds scroll downward at a little over twice the speed of the "ground" under them. I'm really happy with how it turned out and I'm excited with the possibilities for additional "levels". Canyons, cities, some sort of volcano. All good options. I just need to keep myself motivated with this new game. The amount of stuff I have to work on to bring it to where I want it to be is a little daunting to be doing solo, especially given the fact that my most complicated game took a year to finish and probably wont see release for quite some time. We'll see how it all goes.

Updating AndEngine

Recently I decided update my version of AndEngine to GLES2 (before I was using GLES1) and as a result a lot of my code broke. GLES2 has actually been out for some time, but when I first started with AndEngine, I grabbed the first version for whatever reason and it worked so well I never really needed to upgrade. Fixing the errors is just a matter of changing some syntax mostly, but it promises to be a pretty tedious task. I've also run into a couple issues so far with some timer stuff. Because of this, I haven't actually been able to fully test play the game I'm in the process of converting. I'm a little worried that things might not work as well, which would be awful since they were working great before the AndEngine update. Fortunately I made backup copies of all my current AndEngine projects, so worst case scenario is I go back to GLES1 for my current projects, but use GLES2 for any future ones.

Additionally, I've been revisiting the Nail Polish Cataloger. I am attempting have it create a lower res copy of any image you select to attach to an entry. Then the original image can be deleted and the version being used by the cataloger is in an NPC image folder on external storage. The copy will be lower resolution (the app never actually shows the image at a high res) so that your external storage won't get filled with a bunch of large image files that are potentially still on your phone. I'm running into issues with this as well. I can save the copy just fine and have it linked to an entry, but so far the image is always a really small (much smaller than I want) sized image. I'm hoping to have this issue solved soon and working properly in the app's next update.

Database App Released and Puzzle Game

We've released the database app. It's called the Nail Polish Cataloger and as you might expect, it catalogs a person's personal nail polish collection. Tia suggested the idea a while back, and I wanted to play around with SQLite, so I started working on it. You can put in the colors, brand, collection, finish, size, etc. in and then look at them later or edit them or search for specific qualities like blue glossy polishes that cost more than $1. You can assign a picture to each entry in the catalog from your device's gallery. You can get it here:

On another note, I've added a cool (I think it is at least) power-up to the puzzle game I've been working on. The one that was my first attempt at AndEngine stuff. It was already good but I decided it needed a little bit more, and I'm really happy with the idea I added in. Here's how it works: as you destroy tiles on the board, an animated meter to the side fills up. When it is full, it starts glowing red which means the power-up is ready to be used. If you click it while its glowing red, the glow becomes green to show the power-up is "armed". When the power-up is "armed", your next move will destroy a bunch of tiles, but the meter will drain and you'll have to start filling it again to get the power-up back. I'm really happy with the way the power-up works, and especially how it looks. When the meter drains the bar slides back down to the bottom of the meter, and it looks really cool in my opinion. Overall, its a cool addition that I'm pretty excited about.

The Database App Continued

The database app is nearing completion. The user can now set a picture from their device's gallery for each entry and then it will show up on the entry's details page. A small version will also be displayed on the "Add" page as a preview. As far as I can tell, my search is working as well. You can fill out all the information to filter for from drop down lists and the display page is filled with all your entries that meet the criteria. I still need to do a bit more testing on the search functionality. There are a lot of things to search for, and although it seems to be working, there could be some weird combination that screws up the search. I'm fairly certain that my code doesn't allow for that sort of thing so it should be all working smoothly. I added an option to delete the entirety of the main table, but the user has to go through three different confirmation dialogs to do that. The app needs a bit more "field testing" but otherwise it is looking like its almost ready to go, barring any new bugs that haven't yet been found. Hopefully the app will be ready for release sometime soon.

I also plan to release a "Demo" Version that is free and works the same, but limits the user to a maximum of only 10 entries. This would mainly be so that the user can first test the app out and see if it works on their device, is something they would want to use, etc. Making a demo version will be a pretty short process so it should work out all right.

The Database App

I've made a lot of progress on the database app. Up to 7 tables now, which I think is all I need. I've also got a bunch of the pages set up on it. You can fill out a form to add an entry to the database, export the database as a comma delimited file, and import the same type of file back into the database. When you are viewing the list of entries, you can click one and it takes you to a details page where all of the entry's info is listed out along with an "Edit" and "Delete" button. The delete button obviously deletes the entry from the database. The edit button opens up the "add entry" form, but with the entry's info all filled out and when you change and save it, the edited entry takes the place of the old one.

The only major things I have left to do are like a filter/search page where you can pick out some info from the database to filter the list of entries by, and then I'd really like to add the ability to set a picture for each entry that would be shown on the entry's info page. It's going pretty well and I'm hoping to get it all set up in the next few days.