Alpha week
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This week has been a very hectic one, as we been getting closer and closer to the day that our alpha build has to be done. Last week we had gotten a lot of criticism from Marcus and our team morale was on an all time low. But i feel like we turned it around this week and that we have something of worth that we can show at our alpha presentation. One thing that I’ve been working on this week is the player characters projectiles. I didn’t really have any big problems with this. Basically it just creates a projectile when the player pushes a button, depending on the button the projectile flies of in a different direction. To help save memory, the program checks if there’s already an existing projectile that has been “deactivated”, if there is one it reactivates it. If not it creates a new one. In the beginning the player could fire it’s projectiles all across the screen, but I later realized that our game designer wrote that the player only should have about two tiles worth of range. Which in this case was about 128 pixels long. It felt and looked pretty weird from an aesthetic perspective but from a game balance perspective I totally see why it has to be this way. If the player had a very long range he could just stay next to the life tree behind the safety of his own towers and pick enemies of from a distance. Now the player has to get really close and there is a lot of enemies on the screen so the chance of taking damage is quite high. One other thing that I’ve been working on this week is powerups. I started with creating the powerup class which is actually nothing more than an object with a sprite and a collider. All the code for what the power up actually does, happens in the update loop of the player. So for example the strength power up activates when the player collides with the power up. the activatestrenthpowerup method is called and the players damage and attack speed is increased during a period of time. To check the time I use sf::Clock and sf::Time. When ten seconds has passed by I call deactivatestrengthpowerup and the damage and attack speed values are returned to normal.
We have presentation tomorrow, and next week we will start working on the beta build.
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