Now with stars and "LatchMobs"!

Alright! Now that I am confident that my framework will be usable to create a full-fledged game, I’m down to content creation. There’s one last step to the game that I need to implement and that’s changing between screens. That means, it’s almost time to start making mobs, obstacles, pickups and The Artifacts™!

Because I was having trouble reading image data from graphics contexts in Slick, I decided to go with an even more hacky map format: a text file of sequential numbers representing entities. A separate entity that lives for the duration of a single frame builds the level up from a text file with exactly 300 integers (placed however desired). The darker dots in the background are actually a scenic space thing that scrolls as you change between screens… or, will eventually do that but doesn’t quite do so yet. I’m not going to worry about entity priorities unless it seriously needs to be done, and it could be easily set up anyway.

I was too lazy to program the collision between bullet and player, and I forgot to set up the HUD object that displays how much life your character has… whatever that thing is supposed to be. Now it’s lunch time, and on to these tasks:

• Screen switching
• Pickups
• A nice-looking HUD
• More mobs
• More gimmicky obstacles
• Possibly a better sprite for the player.

You can play this demo at the usual URL.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 18th, 2010 at 2:46 pm and is filed under LD #19 - Discovery - 2010. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.