Videogame Biscuit

Due to the holidays, Videogame Biscuit is on a short break. No game development for a few weeks, I’ll be back in January.

I got the base defense turret up and running. The idea behind this unit is providing a defense against bombers who drop large numbers of bombs at the same time. The turret can target up to three bombs at once. It is not 100% accurate, though, and can miss from time to time.
Scripting this thing wasn’t easy. Here’s roughly how it works. There’s an invisible trigger zone above the base. When a bomb enters it, it triggers a 1-second timer and arms the cannon. During that second, two more targets can be locked before the cannon fires. When it does, it has to aim properly and that was the hard part. At first, I wanted the projectiles to have a fixed speed so I had to calculate at what angle to fire to intercept incoming bombs. This, however, turned out to be a recipe for endless loops wich made the game crash. Then I tried something different. I aimed the projectiles a bit below the bomb, and then calculated how fast it had to go for a direct hit. This works almost perfectly. At first I was trying to tweak it to make it 100% accurate, but I decided to keep it as it is.
I quickly created some code that drops bombs at random locations to demonstrate how the defense works and recorded a video of it.

Base Defense from Videogame Biscuit on Vimeo.

Just did a whole week of debugging and making all sorts of adjustments. I had to do a big update on the graphics layers. Layers are a way to determine wich sprites will be drawn in front of each other and are also used to set wich objects can collide. It was starting to get a bit messy, so I had to set them all again to make things run a bit better. And I also play tested the game extensively. I think it’s starting to look pretty good!
So now I’m getting started on the next part. The next base element will be an automatic defense turret that can shoot down incoming bombs and missiles. This also means bombers will start dropping more bombs, of course! From now on, many enemies will also have multiple weapons that can be destroyed separately.

Things have slowed down a bit over the last week because my brother finally convinced me to start playing World of Warcraft, but I did manage to finish the first boss! Here’s him in action, raining down red plasma bolts and firing explosive shells.

The spacecraft starts a heavy plasma bombardment at regular intervals, but they are not difficult to evade. Right before it starts firing, he will level out, so you’ll know you’ll have to get out of the way. From time to time, he’ll also fire explosive shells wich can take out base buildings. Luckily, you can shoot these down.
With the first part of the game done for the most part, I’ll have to put together the level transitions and do a bit of test playing before I start on the next levels. I don’t want to end up with a finished game that’s still full of bugs. This is something for next week, but in the meantime I’ll also start designing the next batch of enemies.

Last week I had finished the design for the first boss, and here’s what it looks like in game:

It took me quite a while to get it to show correctly in the game. The object consists of twelve separate sprites, and it took a lot of trial and error to get them all to line up correctly. The reason it has so many different sprites is that the gun turrets have to be able to rotate and different components can be destroyed separately. This feature will also be present on other enemies in future levels.
For now, the ship moves across the screen and aims at the player. Firing hasn’t been implemented yet, but the shield works and protects the craft. The next step now is making the gun turrets shoot at the player, making them take hits and explode and dropping the shield when both turrets have been destroyed.