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.