Anywho, this is what I think is a fairly important milestone. All five weapons are primed and ready to be used to destroy things. All five enemies have artwork ready, as well as a base to build the AI/behavior around. Any number of enemies can be loaded from a level, as well as any kind of level backdrop, with any number of any kind of walls or obstacles. I'm actually at the point where I need a level editor. I came to this conclusion sometime while I was hand writing the coordinates for 90 different objects in the level file. If you're wondering what they were, they're the walls surrounding my test arena. I dumped level boundaries in favor of wall objects that use Box2D.
Box2D turned out to be mostly just pure awesome... WITH HACKING TABASCO SAUCE!
Sorry, I got a little carried away. It's good, okay? All the enemies, level barriers, players, and everything neatly and easily slid into place. The physics look convincing and realistic. Box2D is a well designed, easy to use-erm... well black box.
There's really not much to say about the sound effects. I threw them all together in audacity, except for the AIFSA sound effect. It's basically a cut-up, remixed, re-organized hackjob of some chainsaw sound effects I dug up online. All the sound effects work well and match the weapons though, so I'm satisfied.
Now, for a word on the control scheme. You see, I originally had a unique control scheme. Forward and backward always moved relative to your ship, which was facing the cursor. Left and right ALSO moved relative to the ship, which led to an abnormal and somewhat unintuitive flip in left/right motion relative to the screen if the ship was facing the bottom. Confused? Don't worry, it would be even worse if you were flying the ship.
The control scheme was little more than an extremely direct circle-strafing system. It worked, but was a little too unique. Ideally there will be a few camera/ship control modes available via the options menu in the final version, but right now I've decided to stick with something a little more simple. The ship simply points at the cursor, but moves relative to the screen.
This is the mark of version 0.0.30. It's all very pretty, but it's starting to be a pain in the face to write out levels by hand. A level editor is in high priority, but I need to port my particle system from SDL to SFML, and make use of it too. This level is getting pretty boring, so I need to come up with more level assets, and hopefully break up the chunky square tiled look it has right now. Additionally, I need to make projectiles explode when they collide with objects, add some basic enemy AI, create a menu, start on the HUD, think up a story, etc. I'm beginning to see this as a smaller and smaller milestone... meh.
I'm doing this to have fun, and it's working. :P
--LazerBlade
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