Game Progress Update #25


Update #25

Hello World! And welcome to the twenty fifth Dev with Dave Game Progress Update!

In this update, I’ve been busy working on level design, and expanding on the zones system.

Zones system

In previous builds of Flappy-vaders, the zones system had been set up with a multi dimensional array to store the zones in, but I had only used the First slot in each to store data, even though a couple of the zone types had two different layouts already.

So, the first thing I did was organise the array contents, allocating the second zone type layouts to [n,1] where they existed, and if there was not then I created an empty zone instead with only the zone marker sprite to indicate the start of the zone.

Next was to implement a system to select the sub zones from the array. I’d planned for this in the early stages of development, and had a variable called subZoneID set to 0 on the line under the one where it selected the primary zone type. I replaced the 0 with Random(0,1) for the time being, although I should have the upper limit as a constant. I’ll address this once I am further along.

Level design

I decided against creating a level editor for this game due to the limited amount of time I have for creating Flappy-vaders each week. This is a decision I am maybe regretting now, lol 🙂

//	Coins
zoneData$[3,0] = "250;130,50,3,0;175,50,3,0;225,50,3,0;275,40,3,0;325,30,3,0;"

The level is stored as a string, which contains the zone length, then groups of three integers to represent the x & y positions and the imageID of the sprite as shown in the code snippet below.

Because of the simplicity of the level data, I am just writing them by hand for the time being. Although I certainly wouldn’t call it fun, and it’s surprisingly time consuming.

Ultimately I would like to create 5 subzones per zone, giving a total of 25 total subzones. This should be adequate for the first round of testing. We can review whether I need to add more after some user feedback.

And that’s all for now

That’s it for this update! I’ll be back in two weeks with the next update.

I’m not sure what I’ll be doing for next time. There are couple of bits which need finishing off in the “In progress” column on the Trello.

I must also set some time aside to review the Trello and GDD to see if there is anything which needs updating there as well.

See you next time 🙂