Quote:Original post by Enselic
The first think you should do is implementing time based movement. The game played way too fast for me to be able to give you any further feedback [smile].

The music was catchy though.

• Increase the gamearea/enemy size ratio. I experience the gamearea a bit tight, there's no room for delicate maneuvering.


• Imlement a more general bullet mechanism. Instead of having a single object that represents a bullet from the player ship, and a single bullet from each alien, write a class that handles all bullets in the game. The bullet structure would be something like
  

  class Bullet{    private Owner owner;    private Vector2 pos;    private Vector2 vel;}

  
  The bullet handler would be something like
  

  class BulletUpdater{    public void UpdateBullets(float deltaTime)    {        foreach (Bullet b in bulletList) {            b.Pos += Vel * dt;    }    public void AddBullet(Bullet b)    {        bulletList.Add(b);    }    private List<Bullet> bulletList = new List<Bullet>();}

  
  This allows you to have a 'rate of fire' for the player ship and the aliens. I suspect you now have something like:
  

  class Alien{    private Bullet bullet;    public void Update()    {        if (bullet.OutsideGameArea()) {            bullet.Pos = alienPos;        }    }}

  
  With the bullet updater you would go
  

  // Within your game loopforeach (Alien alien in aliensInGameList) {    if (alien.CanShoot()) {        bulletUpdater.AddBullet(new Bullet(alien.Pos, ...));    }}

  
  As it is now, the player will shoot faster the closer to the enemies he is (if the bullet hits the enemies).


• Implement a more controllable handling of the ship. I had it hard to really control the ship, it moved very slowly sometimes in some directions, and sometimes not all all in others. A simple way of implementing ship movement is the folling: You have a pos, vel and acc attribute of your Player class and uses something like the foolowing code:
  

  class Player{    private Vector2 pos = StartPos;    private Vector2 vel = new Vector2(0.0f, 0.0f);    private Vector2 acc = new Vector2(0.0f, 0.0f);    public void Update(float deltaTime)    {        if (KeyboardInput.KeyDown(Key.Up)) {            acc.Y -= ShipAcc * deltaTime;        } // and all the other cases            vel += acc * deltaTime;        pos += vel * deltaTime;    }    private float ShipAcc = 100.0f;}

  The movement code can be made more sophisticated, but this works quite well as a 'first' solution.
  


• Let the user bypass the intro. The third and later time you run, it is quite boring to watch the intro again. This brings me to...


• A menu system.Well, these are boring to make, and for an experimental game it is not necessary, but even for testing one shouldn't have to restart the game each round.

• I suddenly just die, no visible stuff hitting me, I just die.