Week 2 & 3 – Weapon Implementation & Setup

I didn’t have the whole week to work on the game as I had to fly down to Texas for a couple of days, but I was able to come up with the exact details to the weapons the game will use. And since I didn’t post last week, I’ll make this post cover what I’ve done in the past two weeks (with this week again not giving me the time I wish I had).

Below is the game as it currently stands:

Since the first post, I was able to implement hitboxes on both the player ship and the enemy ships. This greatly helped with the ability to maneuver and not feel like the game was playing cheap when it hit the empty pixels on your ship. With this, I also changed all the logic to use velocity vectors for movement which will help with future enemies and weapons.

I also implemented three of the six weapon types: normal, clone, and fork. For this demo, you can activate them by just pressing the number keys 1-3. I still need to implement the push, pull, and branching weapons, and am working on those now.

The last thing I did was get a secondary background scrolling for added feel. Nothing too special, but it sure looks a lot better than just a single starry background. I also muted the sound so I didn’t have to  listen to it every time I needed to test a change. Don’t worry, I’ll put it back in when I’m done with the game.

That’s it for this week. Hopefully with Thanksgiving week giving me a break from school, I’ll be able to finish the weapons and even get a few new enemies in the game. I’m trying to come up with a good way to implement AI behavior for moving in different ways across the screen. If you know of any good techniques, please let me know.