Thousander Club Update: December 18th

For this week’s Thousander Club update:

Game Hours: 241.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 / 1000

Target: 987

Only two more weeks!

So I found that I could still come up with 100 ideas, which was surprisingly difficult and easy, depending on the hour. I managed to get multiple aliens to move about, which involved replacing the single alien sprite with a vector of alien sprites. It was a bit tricky, but it was due to my lack of experience with erasing members from a vector.

To handle the movement of the aliens, I have a section of code that looks like:


static int step = 1;
...
if (alien->X() > 970 || alien->X() < 74)
{
step *= -1;
}


Basically, if the alien goes too far to either side, it reverses direction. I thought I would need to replace this variable with an array of variables, but it worked surprisingly well. The aliens all reverse direction together when the far left or far right aliens exit the range.

I am thinking that the alien sprite is too large, however. There are only eight aliens across right now, and they move back and forth too quickly. If I add code to allow them to move down after hitting the sides, the player would have almost no time to fight back. I should also find a way to slow them down in general.

The good news is that I am taking the rest of the year off at my day job, which means that I have this week to work on my own game development. Next week I will be celebrating Christmas and getting last minute shopping/gift wrapping/etc done. I will break down my week into certain tasks I would like to accomplish, and I will try to give progress reports each day.