XianForce's Blog

Looking at the screenshot I would hope you'd notice that now there are two different colored enemies. I added a new type of enemy! The blue ones I call Grunts, and the green ones are called Drones. Drones execute paths more often, and don't just randomly shoot like the grunts. They wait until they are within a certain range (horizontally). So their AI is slightly improved.

Most of the day was spent slightly modifying how AI was executed so that there could be varying levels. I'm a bit less than satisfied with how it is right now. With how I have it at this moment, I will have to recreate the AI for every level. Which is fine considering I can just copy and paste it in. Or I can make later levels have improved AI, so I'm contemplating on whether to keep it where it's at, or move it up the chain so that it can be defined once, and then if needed I can overload it in the base class.

So right now I have 3 more enemies planned: Revenants, Protectors, and Mother Ships.

I'm thinking the goal of each level will be to take out the Mother Ships, and the Protectors will... well protect =p. Each of these next enemies will not have normal bullets, so the next thing I'm going to work on is another bullet. Revenants will have the best overall AI. They'll have the best timing on shooting, dodging, path exectution and so on. Protectors will just take a bullet if need be, and perhaps shoot on some conditions. Mother Ships will only dodge, but they will be quite good at it.

So that's all I plan/hope for. After I get some more of this content done, I want to start working on some things like explosion animations for when something blows up. I also want to change how the enemies move idly. So they aren't just bouncing back and forth, I want it to feel a bit more like Galaga.

Anyways, the problems I had today were all with pointers. I would forget to check if something wasn't NULL, before I did something with it, so a bullet would hit an enemy, or the player and program ends returning a 3.

So really it was just little things here and there that I had forgotten, but for the most part it worked very well, just how I thought.

Sometime I am going to HAVE TO REDO THE PATHS THOUGH!!! All the paths suck, and I need to make them better.

Well that's it for today, I'm signing off!