Day 6: Catching Up

As I mentioned on Day 3's devlog, well, turns out I've been busy enough with college to let it kind of take away part of my free time.

I couldn't do anything for this project, at all, on the last... three days. This is a lot of missed time, and as something I did not predict, means that I'll have to be more organized than ever to meet my requirements.

Though today I'm busy too, I still think I can reorganize my priorities and meet my requirements. So first of all, let's stabilish a small things I need to get done ASAP:

• Enemies. Their form and behavior need to meet with the main gameplay mechanic, which I've been calling the "angled gun", or the ability that the ship has to shoot angled, Y-axis-wrapping projectiles, as it moves. This means that they need to require careful but quick thought, so I have more freedom to play with their Y movement and maybe scale it up to a very simple AI. Oh, and they should also have a health system, since I am allowing a machinegun-type shooting thing.
• Level design. Not just in the sense of enemy disposition, but also in the sense that I need a tool to predetermine enemy disposition on the level. I was thinking about a queue-type thing: we specify WHEN the enemy should be spawned, and then WHAT enemy should be spawned (this means WHICH enemy and WHERE in the Y axis).
• Visual feedback. Very basic particles, because that's the most I can do -- and a pool to control them so I don't get nasty surprises related to garbage collection and whatnot. The player kind of needs to feel himself killing the enemies.
• Visual feedback, AGAIN. The text thing is still buggy and the best approach is to correct it (damn you, OpenGL bugs!), but if I can't, I'm copypasting the stuff I built for that other project for numbers support and that's it. The rest, I can derive from that to allow the usage of pre-rendered text.
• I'm scraping off the idea of most menus. They're not really necessary right now. All I need is a basic presentation screen (can be done by exploiting the usage of an empty level in the background to make it look interesting), a pause screen (darken everything with a black semitransparent rectangle, with the word PAUSE in the middle of screen, visible only when paused -- easy peasy), and a debriefing screen for both end of level and game over. More than that is the topic for a continuity, development after the game jam itself.

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EDIT: Well, as this day went by, I finally managed to get the whole text thing working! Turns out I was commiting a dumb mistake: the whole texture uploading process was being done even before I created the GL context, so of course there would be no valid texture to use! I managed to solve that by adding a setup hook to game-sketch, which guarantees that the setup function will be run when starting the sketch.

By solving that, I was already able to add score and high-score to the menu, though they don't really do anything right now... yet.

Well, next step for tomorrow is doing the whole menu thing and at least starting the enemy spawning stuff. I think a hashmap should be enough for that.