The Path of the Game Dev — Day 14

Saving progress…

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Continuing on with the wave count visual in the UI and building the movement and attacks of the enemy variants.

I finally got the wave count to update with each new spawn wave. Similar to how I had the player’s score update with each enemies’ death, the text will now update at the beginning of each new wave of enemies. The next bit I would like to work on is a pause in the spawning when there are still enemies from the previous wave on the field.

I kept working on the new enemy variants, save for the evasive enemy type and the boss enemy. At the moment I have all of the sprites for the rest done, as well as death animations, and have nearly finished their movements and attacks. On death they now explode just like the original enemy from the tutorial videos. The movements and attack patterns have proven to be more challenging than originally thought.

I fixed the movements of the zigzag type movement from yesterday’s post so now the beam enemy moves left to right as it moves downwards. However, this movement is limited to the positive x values at the moment due to the code, and I hope to modify it to allow for negative x values and possibly an x value of 0 to move back and forth over. But for now I’m okay with it just working!

The puzzle I had fun trying to solve today was the smart enemy shooting backwards after it senses it is behind the player. I’m still trying to figure out how to make that work.

Biggest takeaways from the day: It’s easy to go forward, not very easy to go back.

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Progress saved!