Paved With Good Intentions

Puts on gravely voice.

♫ This is road ... to hell. ♫

So, so much for making a development blog every month as I completely forgot during both May and June. Anyhow, here's July's.

SPARKLES! Everything is better with sparkles, and now sparkles are better than ever before! They're now an animated bitmap texture which changes colour and work along a complimentary colour scheme - eg: opposites, red/green, blue/orange, etc

There have also been some serious improvement in AI. Enemies now come in a variety of flavours.
Red are ranged based enemies who shoot projectiles. Light blue are dumb/zombie melee enemies (and thus carry a white stick to denote that they are melee based class) who stalk the player. Purple/magenta are melee class hunters who follow the player. Black are melee class chargers who rush at the player to attack and go flying past if the player can dodge out of their way.

On top of these enemy classes there are also special types of attacks. These are Radioactive Fire who have a green glownig arua and leave a green fire in their path, who do damage on contact; Electricity who can stun the player for a second and thus reduce movement at close range; Retardant which is a yellow falling aura who stun and slow the player for several seconds on contact; and finally Homing missiles, which come in two forms, one which is semi-accurate and can be dodged without too much difficulty and one which is both fast and accurate and very difficult to dodge.

There is also now a game over screen which lists various statistics for the player such as enemies killed, damage absorbed, cash picked up, etc, and also displays a list of swag collected by their icon's. Currently it's only a game over screen for when the player dies but it will also double as an end of level screen once I get level progression coded - and coding level progression is what I am currently working on.

My thoughts on level progression are as follows. Player needs to get to the exit, but the exit requires unlocking from a separate node. The higher the level, the more nodes there will be to unlock. Currently I am in two-minds whether to have the node activated with cash the same way swag collectibles are purchased, or whether to have them activated by having the player stand in the area for a certain amount of time like base/point capturing in an First Person Shooter (like planting the bomb in CoD multiplayer - though I've not played CoD since number 5 WaW, so what are they up to now? CoD 9000?). Either way, when the level exit it unlocked an enemy Boss appears and must be defeated to open the exit. I think that only defeating the end of level boss will be neccessary rather than cleaning out the whole level (like in say, Risk of Rain).

So that's how things are shaping up on the still untitled Swag 'Em Up!