I think you should try some similar games and see how they work.
Here is one such game -
http://www.gamedev.net/community/gds/viewentry.asp?projectid=301616

Well, you asked for behaviour which has nothing to do with the code.

Quote:Original post by jbosch

Quote:Original post by Chetanhl
I think you should try some similar games and see how they work.
Here is one such game -
http://www.gamedev.net/community/gds/viewentry.asp?projectid=301616

Thanks but there are no code assets or design there, isn't it?

Yes there are no code assets or design there but you can observe enemy behaviour. That game is quite fun.

Don't overdo objects IMHO. Just make the game work, the more games you make, the better the architecture will be. I think it's no use to struggle with a perfect/clever design if you are a beginner, it's your first game after all.

You know all the elements, sit down, and start to code. Some planning on paper with a pen can do wonders. For levels: maybe you could look into "state machines", but that's just one way to solve things. I usually do the "level" things with a bit more complex game loop instead of game states.

If you're talking about a 2D scrolling shooter, well, the idea is pretty simple
really.

At its base, you can prepare (ahead of time) an array of enemies (or whatever name
you might conjure for them) that are sorted by distance. When I say distance,
I mean in a logical coordinate space.
When the view scrolls, each frame it advances a certain X distance in the logical
space. At that point you can check if an enemy needs to enter the view.
One way of doing that is to check the next entity (they are sorted, remember ?)
and see if its within a certain threshold of the view's "top" position.

That's one way. Of course there are other ways. For a shooter that uses a tilemap
with attributes you might have a trigger so that when a tile is rendered (enters
the view) it activates its trigger, which can be to spawn the next enemy.

I've implemented such a game not too recently in J2ME. Works great so everything is
still fresh in my mind :)

I've made such a game, problem is I was quite new to C++ at the time, so not everything is done the right way.

Here's how I stored my enemies and weapons (= the bullets shown on screen):

list<Actor*> Enemies;list<Weapon*> Weapons;

As for adding enemies, I wrote my own "scripting language" where the .mission files looked like this:

6-1 RestartTimer-1 If Kills> 3 EndMission2000 SpawnEnemy 1004000 SpawnEnemy 300-1 WaitTillEnemies 0-1 Goto 1

Of course you can make your ships appear randomly, or make an event queue:

typedef struct Event{  long int T;  int E;};queue<Event *> event_q;

T is the number of milliseconds after which the event will be executed, E is the type of the event. As for executing the events, assuming the queue is sorted (you could use a priority queue for that), you only need to do this...

while(Events[NextEvent].T <= T.GetTicks()){  //switch(Events[NextEvent].E)..}

And this is how I add new enemies inside the code:

Enemies.push_back(new Actor(SCREEN_WIDTH-100,new_pos,Ships[1]));

Ships[1] is a pointer to a ShipType object. This way I could create different enemies. At the time, I didn't know what inheritance meant. :P

A bullet is fired like this... I pass the constructor the type of the weapon (again, inheritance was an unknown word at the time), the position and a pointer to the actor who fired the weapon.

Weapons.push_back(new Weapon(Type->MainGunWeapon,pos,this));

This is how enemies and weapons are Display()-ed:

void MoveViewEnemies(){	list<Actor*>::iterator i;	for(i=Enemies.begin();i!=Enemies.end();i++)	{		(*i)->MoveByAI();		//If the enemy is not dead, show it on the screen		if((*i)->Move()) (*i)->Display(Screen);		//else destroy it		else		{			delete *i;			i=Enemies.erase(i);		}		if(i==Enemies.end()) break;	}	return;}void MoveViewWeapons(){	list<Weapon*>::iterator i;	for(i=Weapons.begin();i!=Weapons.end();i++)	{		//Move the weapon, if it goes offscreen destroy it		if(!(*i)->Move())		{			delete *i;			//Weapons.pop_back();			i=Weapons.erase(i);		}		//Othewise show it on the screen		else (*i)->Show(Screen);		if(i==Weapons.end()) break;	}	return;}

Collision detection is done inside the Move() functions.

If you need something else, let me know. I would have no problem giving you the full source code if it wasn't so "ugly".