Bosses and Explosions

I've recently made several exciting additions to the scrolling shooter. First of all, I added the explosions I wanted to get in there. Now, when you kill an enemy minion, the sprite is quickly replaced with an animated explosion. Its simple enough, but I actually ran into some annoying problems with it when I was adding it in. It turned out to be a rather simple threading issue, but it took me quite a while to track down after a decent amount of debugging, so that was annoying. Everything is fixed now and the explosions are working quite well.

I've also been working on getting some bosses added to the game. I have some cool polymorphism going so that I can have each boss be a separate child class of my base "Boss" class. The first boss is pretty easy, moving from left to right on the screen, occasionally shooting overly large bullets at the player. they are easy to dodge and the pattern they are shot at is very simple, but that's pretty much what I'm looking for out of a first boss. In addition to the boss, I've added the bar I mentioned in my last post that shows how close to the boss the player is. A small icon moves up the bar and when it's at the top, the boss appears. I also made it so that when the boss appears, this "progress bar" is replaced by the boss's health meter. Making use of the above mentioned explosions, when the boss dies it is replaced by 6 explosion animations and the player beats the level.

I've created minions for a new level, but the game only plays one hard coded level at a time. Currently I have the second level's minions combined with the first level's boss. The second level minions are bugs that come in two classes that I have deemed "Sprayers" and "Strikers". The Sprayers shoot two slow-moving bullets at a time at diagonals. They don't shoot very frequently, but there ends up being quit a few bullets on the screen when there are multiple Sprayers flying around. The Striker class minions don't shoot bullets at all, but their movement paths cause them to dive very low on the screen and the player has to either kill or dodge them as they make their charge. These minions also tend to move quite fast so the player has to have quick reflexes. In the screenshots below, the green bugs are the Sprayers while the red ones are the Strikers, both flying around above my MS Paint lava flow background. The red and gray triangle is the player sprite and the small blue triangles are the player's bullets.

 

My next objectives include adding in a point system, making the second boss, and then getting the game to the point where a second level starts when the first level is beaten. From there I can start working on even more levels with more exciting minions and different bosses.