Phil Peron Flash Platform Developer and Game Development Hobbyist

S’troidz!: Week 4 Update

I’m continually amazed at how difficult game design is. I was reminded of this during the r4 dev cycle when I started implementing power-ups and other goodies. Given the platform I’m building on, it was easy. Adjusting the game play so that it was still fun was tricky and required a change to how the ship moves.

When I first started development on S’troidz! I knew I wanted power ups. It’s surely one of those ‘must have’ items when building a shmup and acts as a device that lures the player into the fray. I like the idea of incentivizing player movement so much that I removed the extra life power up in favor of tokens (called ’s’troid core’) that will be used toward earning another ship. Once this was implemented, I realized I had a big problem.

Forcing players to move often is fine provided you give them a vehicle to do so that’s easy and most importantly, fun. Unfortunately, a zero-drag ship tasked with collecting many items in a short period of time is not. It felt like trying to collect marbles on an ice rink. And we all know what that means: marbles + ice rink = not fun. So with a few taps on the keyboard I added something that would solve my problem and also completely change the style of the game. Friction. You’ll notice now that moving the ship feels more like maneuvering a drift car. This makes it easier to collect power ups, s’troid core and in my opinion, makes it more fun.

Also worth noting is the Loot Controller component I wrote to support any ’stuff’ that could potentially drop from killing baddies. It’s pretty basic in it’s current form. Internally, the loot controller rolls against a table that returns the manager in charge of creating the loot you ‘won’. The biggest problem with my implementation is that it relies completely on my Spawn-family of classes. This makes sharing the component (which was my hope) difficult should someone else have their own way of spawning game objects. Frankly, creating loot and spawner components fit for public consumption merits it’s own development timeline. Needless to say, it’s out of scope for the S’troidz! project.

OK, up and at ‘em!

S’troidz! r4 Changelog

• Implemented Loot Table Component
• Created S’troid Core Spawner and Sprites
• 50 S’troid Core collected grants a new life.
• Created Increased Fire Power, Power-Up
• Various bug fixes with just a hint of refactoring

I have a lot of non-game related work and traveling to do over the next dev cycle and thus won’t be releasing a new version of S’troidz! next week. Once my schedule clears up, I’ll start work on a new alien type and if time allows, another power up.

Thanks for visiting!