Completing the scrolling shooter in GM
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The scrolling shooter game whose creation steps I described in one of the previous posts was the first really playable version – i.e., you had a challenge (approaching enemy planes) and an action to overcome the challenge (shoot/avoid the enemy planes). However, that version was pretty bland. There was only one kind of enemy planes and hitting any one of them meant losing the game. Boring. In this post I present the next version of the game, here. I’m not going through the steps in this post as the ideas are the same, just applied to new objects and behaviours. The new version includes everything that was explained in the tutorial: * fully implemented health and lives system (collisions with planes and bullets inflict damage on your plane; when the plane is sufficiently damaged, it is destroyed and you lose a life. Once you lose all 3 lives, you lose the game) * added extra enemy types: orange planes that always shoot bullets vertically; white planes that shoot bullets towards your plane; blue planes that fly upwards from the bottom of the screen * some further improvements by myself: full screen mode; enemy planes cannot appear on the screen so that you cannot hit them (i.e., with bigger part of the plane outside the screen). The implementation of enemy beaviour was done as described in the tutorial. Enemy planes which are shot down or fly outside the screen simply reappear at random x-position. This way the number of planes that are on the screen never decreases, it only increases because of the event that keeps adding them periodically. This makes the game progressively more difficult, which is expected. However, player performance doesn’t play any role here – a player with exceptionally good shot and a player who misses most of the planes do equally well. The screen will be cluttered with enemy planes anyway pretty soon. This is unfair. (By the way, such behaviour gives a good example of a creeping doom game – you can never win and it only gets worse all the time.) In addition, the game does not create the feeling that you are going somewhere. There are dozens of planes everywhere but no sense that you are somehow advancing the story. A more advanced AI should be scripted that does not simply move the shot planes outside the screen and make them reappear but rather makes them appear in a specific (time-based) pattern. Also, separate levels may be introduced to allow for some kind of narrative in the game. Time permitting, I plan to further expand this game and see what might come of it.  |
