Update #3

Hello and welcome to the third Dev with Dave Game Progress Update. I’ve been busy building on the prototype systems which had been developed previously.

Zones

I have added a second subset of zone data to better demonstrate the random selection of zone subsets. I also included a length value into the zone data so that zones can vary in length and still flow seamlessly from one to the next.

Player Death

Adding the hitboxes to the sprites was fairly simple in AGK, as was checking the collisions. I opted for the more complex polygon shape (Polygon will create a close fitting convex polygon around the visible pixels of a sprite) as I am only checking for collisions with a handful of sprites and it will mean more exact collision detection.

I also added a simple particle based explosion to the player ship which plays when there is a collision. The image used for the particles is one taken from an asset pack I purchased years ago and is simply a placeholder again for the time being.

Game States

Another system I’ve added as a prototype in this update is a system for handling game states which was necessary to allow the transition from Playing the game to the player crashing and the game over message being shown.

This system works by having two variables to track the GameMode (Things like Initialisation, Showing Menu, Playing Game, etc) and Loop Mode (Which breaks the game mode down into sections, e.g. Pre-Game, Game, Post-Game stuff). This way I simply have to update a variable to switch from running one bit of code, to the next.

User Interface

I have added a script for the UI stuff, and added a simple text only Game over message to display when the player has crashed.

I’ll be developing the UI further at a later point in development.

GDD Updates

There are a few changes which need making to the GDD this week.

I had omitted the fact the the player dies if they crash into the bottom of the screen (in section 3.5 Player Death), and there are a couple of new additions as well.

I’ll try and make these changes over the weekend and get the revised Flappy-vaders GDD uploaded on Monday.

In the next update

And thats all for this time. Over the next two weeks I will be carrying on with getting some more prototype systems in place for the other zones.

I will also spend some time creating graphics to replace the placeholders that I am using currently.