I apologise for the placeholder art [headshake] but I thought it would be better to release something to get people's thoughts on the gameplay. At the moment there is just one level that repeats forever. It contains one of each type of enemy. At the moment they are all the same apart from colour. They are:
Blue = Police Cruiser (standard everything)
Grey = Police Van (slow, doesn't fire, always tries to capture, high HP)
Green = Army Fighter (fast, fires more often than cruiser)
Brown = Asteroid (slow, doesn't fire, doesn't capture, in the final game it won't stop either)
I would like to know what you think of the enemies are they too fast/too slow/fire too often/not often enough/too strong/too weak etc?
The enemy stats and image file names are loaded from a text file now so any changes to stats should be easy to do. This has been the major thing I have added today along with a (very quick) explosion animation.
Here is a list of things that I still need to do (more for myself because at the moment it feels like I'm just flitting about from one thing to the next):
Gameplay
1) Have enemies flash when hit and put in a bullet 'explosion'
2) Make asteroids never stop
3) Finish LevelEnd gamestate (i.e show the number of each enemy destoyed, the points per enemy and a total score (also hit% possibly)) (EDIT: And a 'press space/enter to continue' message)
4) Finish GameOver gamestate (offer the player to restart level for a points deduction or to quit and have some sort of prompt for initials)
5) Different bullet types (EDIT: including stronger and faster bullets), loaded from a file (also missiles possibly)
6) Give the different enemies different bullets (load this from the enemy file)
7) Different levels, loaded from a file
8) Boss
Image Improvements
1) All the screens: title screen, game over screen, high score screen (EDIT: And intro screens - at the moment is just says 1 and 2)
2) All the ships: cruiser, van, fighter, asteroid, player, boss
3) All the bullets: (should just need one and then recolour)
4) Ship and bullet explosions
5) Font
6) Introduction and Ending scenes
Sounds
1) Background music
2) Explosion
3) Bullet firing
It's also getting to the point where, like in Breakout, I feel like I'm just throwing code together to get whatever I'm doing to work. This is, again, probably because I didn't plan is as much detail as I should have (particularly in designing classes). But next time...next time it will be perfect...hopefully [rolleyes].
Thanks for reading.
Any comments on the demo would be much appreciated.
-AEdmonds
Cool that enemies grab you. I really like that idea and might steal it.
Intro screen is a little confusing, I guess you're going to put an intro sequence there?
Overall, it seems a little too easy. You should make some enemies faster and give them faster bullets.
Your To-do list looks pretty good, like you know where to go next. Keep up the good work.