For the longest time that I can remember playing video games as a kid, I just loved the way the explosions felt and they way they were animated. It was quite a satisfying feeling. I always gravitated toward the space shoot-em-ups (SHMUPS). Funny, not once in my life did I ever think I would be a computer programmer capable of actually producing something that I loved as a child. I am pretty excited to show you the results the hard work I have put in over the past week. I pretty much focused on 3 main areas. So, let’s get to it … Oh, for the newcomers, welcome! For those that continuous read these posts, thank you .. seriously, it means a lot!
Explosions
When I started learning how to program in sprite kit, I was new and I pretty much had no idea wtf I was doing. I mean, I knew how to program and I have made a couple of small games in the past, but this is, by far, the biggest venture I have taken.
Like I said above, the explosions were something I always just wanted to get right; something I wanted to look and feel good. I have gone through many transitions of how I wanted them to look and if you looked at some of my older screenshots you would know what I am talking about.
Here are a couple of samples of what I am talking about:
Special Weapons
What is a space shooter game without awesome weapons? Well, go out and get yourself a pet rock and let me know how that goes. There are going to be a few of them for this release and in future upgradeable releases there will be a lot more.
The one that I really wanted to get done right were the heat-seeking missiles. They are AWESOME. You can either tap anywhere on the screen and the missile will head there and make a nice BOOM! or you can click on an enemy target and the missile will follow it until its demise.
I was able to complete this last night, but now without 8 cups of coffee and scotch tape to hold up my eye-lids. The results were awesome, but I need to clean up the code a little bit to make it more efficient. Here are some samples:
Level Editing
Yeah, I have discussed this before; a lot actually. Most of my levels are hardcoded into the game itself. While this works for me, in the future it will be cumbersome if someone wanted to create their own. I have been fighting the idea of creating a level editor for some time, but I am now convinced that building a very basic one is a necessity.
I am not talking Mario Maker here, I am talking about a basic text document created that will be read by my game to generate the enemies based on certain time-intervals and conditions.
This game is going to be hard, but it is going to be a lot of fun. Thee will be a lot of things to blow up! Check out my IndieDB account as well. I just created my game profile there and it would be awesome if you guys could check it out once in a while. Stay tuned folks. We are getting there!
