Update

It's been a while a long while actually. Sadly we have had to put the project on hold for a while. We do have every intention of eventually finishing InfiniShooter at some stage but September crept up on us and now we are all bogged down with college work. The college year is over soon and we will have more time on our hands.

In the mean time have a look at this blog. Circes Suck.

Specific Spawning

Since I've already had a good base of the enemy class finished, I decided it was time to figure out how I was going to specify where they would spawn. So, as usual, I started a new class called 'EnemySpawner' (Believe it or not!), that would take care of most of the functionality. There were the basic fields like Texture and Vector position, but there was also a couple fields such as spawnRate and spawnTimer that were quite important.

For the texture, I quickly done one up on Photoshop.

Its just rough and temporary. (Hopefully Lynch can improve it a good bit!)

After giving the texture a position and drawing it to the screen, it was just a matter of specifying the spawn rate. I used the 'TimeSpan' keyword and set the spawn rate to two seconds. Then the spawn timer is set to zero initially. By now, I had created a list to hold any enemies that were being created. So every two seconds an enemy is created at the specified spawn point and added to the list.

Thats about all that was needed for the spawning, initially anyway. Further down the line I expect that the spawner will be placed just as the rest of the items on the maps are.

It made sense at the time...

Up until now, I had been doing any and all code in a Windows Game project. This wasn't a problem until it came to fine tuning the controls for the player ship. I had the basic movement done, but this wouldn't be good enough for the type of game we had in mind. We were looking for accurate rotation and acceleration depending on how much the player moves the virtual thumb sticks (thats something for another post!).

So at the time, I attempted to translate some virtual thumb stick acceleration and rotation to key presses. After a good long while trying this method, which made sense at the time, I realised that it would be much easier and waste much less time, to create a Windows Phone 7 project instead. After doing this, I put all my existing code into the new project and added the new movement using the touch controls. I don't have a Windows Phone 7 to deploy the project on myself, but the emulator works well for what is required.

(I was supposed to put an image of the game running on the emulator here, but Print Screen doesn't seem to work while the emulator is running!)

Hidden Areas

After finishing the Player class (for the time being at least), there was quite a few other aspects of the game that were easier to start on. For no reason in particular, I decided to have a look at how we were going to handle the hidden or secret areas in the game. We had already confirmed that we would have an area every now and then that wouldn't be too obvious to start with, but after searching around a little bit, would be revealed. We came to the decision that the best way to achieve this, would be to hide these areas behind regular walls/pipes that surround each level.

For starters, I needed a temporary wall to experiment with and see what would look best for the game. I drew up a very simple and fairly terrible pipe in Photoshop, for what was intended it was fine!


Firstly, I decided to have a look at how I would detect the players proximity to the wall rather than the effect that was going to indicate the secret. Thankfully there is a great function of 'Vector2' called 'Distance'! Using this, all I had to do was specify what distance between the two objects would trigger the effect.

I tried out a couple of different effects on the wall, such as a pulsating effect and one that grows the pipe temporarily. But we settled with what we thought looked best, which is a fading effect on the pipe. For this effect I needed a few new fields, such as an alpha value and a speed at which to fade.

After trying out different speeds and different levels of opacity, I settled with a slow(ish) fade to half opacity when the player is within a certain distance of the pipe.


(You can ignore the end of the relentless enemy in that last picture!)

Video Update Friday Part 2

In this video update we show off the great progress we have made since last week. It shows a movable ship and being able to shoot from the ship. The red lines going across and down the screen are laser beams. Obviously there is no collision detection implemented yet. But thet will be coming shortly.

The Idea behind InfiniShooter

While looking through the previous blog posts, which are all good in their own right, I noticed that we never really explained what the idea behind InfiniShooter was so I’m going to have a go at it.

Back at the end of May when we finished our second year at college we had already decided that we were going to have a go at making a game over the summer to keep what we had learned that year fresh in our minds or even to learn something new. This we thought would help us be ready for our third year of college.

So we started brainstorming ideas. We originally came up with the idea of a side scrolling shooter/platformer. However we decided to abandon that idea for now for several reasons. One of them being that it would take too long to make. We eventually landed on the idea for InfiniShooter a while later.

Now that the back story is out of the way it’s time to talk about InfiniShooter. Initially InfiniShooter was just going to be a straight puzzler game with little to no action. But then we decided that a little action never hurt anything so we incorporated shooting and enemies. The back story we came up with is as follows:

“Some time in the future over an un-named planet a massive battle between two fleets of ships has occurred and your side lost. All that is left of these armadas is the mother ship of the opposing force. You take control of a drone and it’s your job to enter the mother ship and find your way to the central power core and destroy it.”

The levels will consist of puzzle segments and shooting segments. There will also be lost of enemies between you and the power core. Littered throughout the levels will be hazards such as laser turrets, plasma turrets, jets of fire and many more obstacles. 

Let’s hope it turns out as well as we have planed.

Map Tiles

Lately I've spent most the last few weeks doing designs for the tile map of the game which took up more time than i first planned but it is moving along slowly but im getting there improving each tile. So far i've mainly done a few tiles that are nearly complete and others will take some time before there are fully done hopefully tomorow will help speed things up. We all contributed with design's of various tiles we cames up with and mixed together some designs to come up with new one's.

First i will show you the plaine tile design well this is the first design we came up with

I quickly improved this after an hour just wanted to show you all the starting image first. And the more updated version of the same tile below it.

Secondly i've designed an electricity emitter so far and a turret(need more work before i put up).

I changed it slightly to the original trying to give it a nice effect in the centre

No Effect

Filter, lighting, glow and shadow Effect

Here are the some of the edge tile's of the game, i've more to put up but currently i've go through several tile and i'l throw up one or two tonight on another few in the morning once i sort out what ones to use here are some of my pipe designs:

Here are some the pipe design's of done with more on the way soon and guys if the colours a problem don't worry its only for show, so hope you're happy with these designs and get back to me and let me know what you think.