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.

Player Ship

Here i am going to show you how the development of the player ship changed as time progressed on and how it appears now.

1.First I came up with a few different designs for the ship and eventually got set on one specific design pattern here is the orginal version of the Drone ship:

2.I put in a bit of colour to give you all an idea of the appearance when it is done but currently this is just for show.

3. I started to throw in shadows and lighting and other effects to give the ship a better a look and feel. Over all I found it to improve the appearence quite a bit.

4. The next two are really just optional I put on rockets to the back of the ship to let people know which end is which + thought it might add more to the drone as we felt it was missing some parts to it.

Version 1
Version 2




5.This is the overall design i've come up with so far i just put in some shaps and more colour because the ship seemed a bit bland. I also thought the larger rockets were far more effective for the drone but i'd be glad to get some feed back and hear what you all think.

This is all the latest on the player ship design, I'll be doing little changes here and there and would be glad to hear feedback from the team or anyone who's interested in sharing the opinion.

Sensible Structure

Having finished the the basics of the player, I decided to start a new project and start using classes. Since the player ship wasn't going to be the only type of ship in the game, it made sense to create a 'Ship' super class with some basic properties common to enemies and the player. This was a fairly simple class that contained fields like texture, position, velocity and anything else common to all ships. I just had to copy in the player properties and functions from the previous project into the 'PlayerShip' class, so it was finished with for the time being. Next I decided to start on the enemy ship class. Again, I got the sprites from the same website!


The 'EnemyShip' class was designed to look after the rotation of the enemy in relation to the player and its position. I didn't want to make this class too specific as there will be many different types, each with their own properties and functions. So the 'EnemyShip' class will be sub-classes later on. So after finishing theses two classes and adding a bit of code to the main game class, I had a limited number of enemies spawning and following the player wherever he went!

Creating the Menu Transitions

For the menu transitions I wanted to have good looking animations between transitions rather than having it just switch between the menus and sub-menus instantly because the menu is the first thing people see when they go into your game. I also felt that animations in the menu added to the overall quality of the game. So I settled on a sliding animation. When you pushed the options button the main menu would slide off to the left and the options would slide on from the right. If you wanted to go back to the main menu the options screen would slide off and main menu slides back onto the screen. The same operation would happen for the level selector button.

Here you can see the butons sliding off the screen

To do this animation the first thing I did was set an off-screen and on-screen position for all the menu screens. When you press the options button the top-most button on the main menu will start to slide off to the off-screen position. Once that button passes a specified position the second button will start to slide and then the next and the next until all the buttons have reached the off-screen position. This gives you a domino effect. After this the options screen will start to slide to the on-screen position from the opposite side.

Here the buttons are sliding back onto the screen

I hope you found this interesting. Discussing menu making is not the most interesting part of game making but it is essential. This may be the last post about the menu for a while.

Video Update Friday Part 1

There we go. One video update. In this video update we show off the new level selector screen and the very early player movement by Brían which was mentioned in another post here. As stated this is a very early test video and a lot of progress has been made since. But we will leave that for another update video.

I have plans to post something about how I handled the transitions between screens on the main menu shortly. So look out for that. Look next week for a brand new post every day. Well thats the plan anyways.

Graphics Design

Im currently working on designs for the game. We all are looking into it and have done a lot of research into how we want the game to look and feel. Each of us put in different designs for drones, backgrounds etc. and eventually decided on the drone design which is nearly complete but still needs some improvement in a few areas. I'll soon post up the finished version and other ships + the tiles(bit longer) after i get some more work done to give you all an idea how part of the game will look design wise.

Player Movement

We decided to split up jobs and work on different parts of the game simultaneously(as you do!). I started with player movement and anything related to the player. I usually start without any regard for classes or structure and just do everything in the Game class. This is not at all ideal for final code/product but for testing purposes I think it's fine. Since InfiniShooter is set inside a spaceship, we didn't want the movement to be too 'floaty', for lack of a better term. We wanted an acceleration/deceleration effect on the ship for a more realistic look and feel.

There were certain basic fields that the ship needed to achieve this, such as position and velocity. Then there were two very important constants: speed and friction. When a key was pressed(W,A,S or D in this case) I added or took away speed from the Velocity (X and Y, respectively). After that I just had to add the new velocity to the ships position on screen and then apply friction to the velocity for the acceleration/deceleration effect. Of course there was just a matter of drawing the sprite, which for testing purposes, I used one of the space ships from http://www.xnadevelopment.com/ , a great XNA tutorial site, but we'll replace it with some custom ship eventually.

Managing the levels

I started the level management by thinking a lot about how it should work. I came up with several different ideas. My first idea was to write a custom content importer but I ran into compatibility issues and decided to go a different way. The method I decided upon was directly importing the files into the program directory and loading it in from there.

First thing I did after all that thinking was create a level class and a tile class. The level class contains a grid of tiles, a timer for when we eventually implement the timing mechanism, a starting point and a ending point.

This is the format of the level file. Each character represents a different type of tile and is separated by a blank space. This file is then read in line by line. By using the blank spaces as a separator I split the line up and converted each character into a tile object. Each tile object has an x/y location and a tile id. After that all that is left to do is to draw them on the screen.

 This image shows the level when drawn using temporary tile images.

Creating Infini Shooters Menu

It may seem strange that I started making a menu before making anything else. There are 4 of us making this and my job was making the menu and managing the levels. I started the level management first but came across a few problems and became frustrated with it for a while. Thankfully those problems have now been solved however I had already created the menu beforehand.

Creating a menu in XNA is a time consuming process. Unless you are going to commit to using an openly available UI library you are going to need to create all the UI elements yourself. I started off by designing the assets for the UI, mainly the buttons and the logo. This is where the mood for the menu was decided upon. I went for a calm effect with not too many colours because the game will be a slow paced puzzler with some shooting segments and I felt that it would fit well with the tone of the game. The font used in the logo is part of the XNA redistribution pack.

Next up was actually the creation of the main menu. I created a menu manager game component to manage the drawing and input. Then there was the creation of a button class and a list of buttons in the menu manager class and lastly the positioning and drawing of the buttons. After this I felt that it was too static and needed some movement.

I then set about adding some depth and movement to the menu for added effect. I first created a particle class. I then created a particle generator class to manage the drawing and the movement of the particles. To add the illusion of depth I gave each particle a random speed and a random colour between dark grey and white. When it all came together it added a nice feeling of depth to the scene.

Now for the finished menu.

Welcome

Welcome to our new brand new blog detailing the development of our new game Infini Shooter for the windows phone 7 platform and xna.

Infini Shooter is part dual joystick shooter and part puzzler. You pilot a drone and it is your job to fly your way through a hostile enemy ship to its central core and destroy it. Our intention is to mix fast flowing combat with slow moving puzzle sections.