Day 9: One Final Effort

This is almost the last day of development! As I write this devlog, there is only 1 day and 5 hours ahead so I can take care of minor stuff and submit my entry to the Lisp Game Jam 2018.

In the last post, I was quite worried that I wouldn't make it in time. Turns out this won't be the case. Of course, I'm still on a tight schedule but, considering everything I've been through, I'm making a good time.

Today, I managed to:

• Add proper level loading;
• Make enemies interact with bullets and with the ship itself;
• Add a game-over screen (and a welcome/title screen, which is basically the game over screen when you run the game for the first time);
• Configure the player's death, the enemies' death, and the score.

Unfortunately, the game is pretty rough around the edges. Instead of dealing with more complex collision as I first desired, such as collision between triangles and circles (for the machinegun) and triangles vs. oriented bounding-boxes (for the torpedoes), I ended up treating everything as shapes existing inside their hitboxes, which are all circles, because circle vs. circle collision is so easy to program that it might have only taken me 5~10 mins to do, and then I could focus on the rest. It doesn't render the game unplayable, but avid eyes will notice hitboxes which are very tolerant at times, and very unforgiving at others.

There are still a few things I need to iron out:

• Finish building the first level, and the build the second one. I'm probably going to build the first one by creating some "formations" and then add those formations to the level, and the second level is probably going to be a random spawn of such formations. Well, that is, if I don't just create one level. Bear with me.
• Level progression. Which means, triggering a level end. Which means, depending on the outcome of the topic above, just ending the game abruptely, stopping player control, and showing a game over screen. Maybe even changing the game over text...
• Actually compiling the game, which is something I already got scripts for. This means that I'll generate a blob for Linux and an .exe with SDL2 and SDL2_Image DLL's on a zip for Windows, along with these libraries' licenses.
• I also need to add a way to get more torpedoes. I mean, I think I could leave it as it is for now, but I'm not sure.
• It might also be good to add the controls to the title screen.

I can already feel that the entry is pretty much finished at this point. Even though I still need the level and the game itself is far from finished, I'm satisfied with what I'd call a small, proof-of-concept game.