Phil Peron Flash Platform Developer and Game Development Hobbyist

S’troidz!: Week 3 Update

I learned more than I produced this week. This wasn’t by choice. I had planned for a lot more. What started as a leisure session to create some explosions (among many other things) ended up being a complete rewiring of nearly half of the classes that make up S’troidz!

When I first started tying game objects together I used events exclusively. Having just started using PBE, I wasn’t interested in changing the tools I was comfortable with. What I didn’t expect was how events would behave when you start dispatching, handling and responding to many of them several times per second. The results were sketchy. Inconsistent. The worst case scenario is that an event never reaches the handler. Unfortunately for me, this happened way too often. Shoving aside a list of items I wanted to address this week, I decided to rewrite the communication layer using function pointers instead.

The results were fantastic. It’s precise, reliable and direct. The downside is that I lose the convenience behind using events. For a relatively simple game like S’troidz! it’s not too gnarly having to manage it all yourself but in the future, I’ll probably want to design a more formal system. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still using events for other, less timely things but if it’s super critical, time sensitive and/or needs to happen in a serial fashion, I’ll stick with callbacks. OK, moving on…

Explosions! If refactoring a bunch of code was for me, adding explosions was for the player. It’s almost silly how something like this can add so much value to a game. Maybe I’m just being juvenile but it really is more fun when you can blow crap up.

Speaking of blowing crap up, why don’t you give it a shot?

S’troidz! r3 Changelog

• S’troidz no longer spawn on top of your ship.
• Explosions!
• Adjusted flight pattern of the ‘Waver’ alien. (If you’ve been hanging out in the center of the screen, you may want to think about moving.)
• A few other minor bug fixes.

This week I plan on wrapping up last week’s tasks which included creation of a loot table and power-ups. If I can rip threw those, I might begin work on the next alien type.

Let me know if anything breaks or just plain sucks.