PROJECT: TFP SDCOM – 5

Lots of good progress, I think, over the last couple of weeks!

After establishing that I shouldn’t “change” any existing items, I went ahead and changed the explosion sprite animation, the clipping clouds were distracting.

The big news is that there is a simple leveling system now. Very simple. As an “arcade”-style game, this is “playable”. The levels will run forever and your score will simply increase, or more probably, decrease forever.

A couple of things that I did notice, going to level 10. If the player’s interceptor bangs right on to the falling gravity bomb, they delete each other (effectively) – no explosion. I also noticed that the hostile weapon spawner continues to target destroyed cities. Of course, it would. I haven’t told it to stop once they’re destroyed. At the moment, this isn’t breaking anything so I’ll put it on the second tier list. I’ll probably fix it soon.

I also began scrapping together a weather system. At the moment, the cloud spawner simply spawns clouds which traverse the space (and then delete themselves) with some control for spawn timing (lower timing = more clouds, of course) and speed. At some point I’m going to apply a canvas (color) modulation (through Godot). When it is say, stormy, we’ll make it darker. This will also serve with explosive flashes. At least I think it will, I haven’t done that sort of thing before. And it will also work with the radar system.

In terms of priority for the next couple of weeks, I’m going to focus on integrating the weather system to the levelling. And work on the canvas modulation. That will lead me to the radar system and, doubling the amount of art. (PS: And sound, I need to put in some sound).

Next Steps:

See you then!

• Simple stage leveling system
  • with a textual indicator
• Weather system + canvas modulation
  • Sunny day (i.e. what I’ve been doing)
  • Partial clouds
  • Overcast
• Radar system
• Art:
  • Create clouds
  • Update city explosion (looks awkward with the clipping)
  • New launcher (not a silo, I’ve decided)
  • New font
• Sound
• Future Fixes:
  • Interceptor/Hostiles delete each other without an explosion
  • Hostiles continue to target destroyed cities (and deduct points, when successful).