Bullet Hell Survive Alpha

One thing that I always try to do when I'm writing a game/app/whatever is to use simple placeholder graphics. There are a couple of good reasons for this. Firstly, it makes you concentrate on the gameplay - if the game doesn't feel fun with simple graphics then it's not going to feel fun however good you make the graphics. When I worked at Denki  we had a rule about not making our graphics any more "real" than basic coloured shapes until the core gameplay felt fun. Secondly, it gives a blank canvas to whichever artist comes in to create the proper graphics. At some point in the development of this game I'll get an artist in (applications for the position are open!) and I don't want to prejudice their view of how the game should look - I want the artist to tell me  how it should look. Finally.. it stops me from getting distracted and spending too much time tweaking the graphics when (see first point) it doesn't make any difference at this stage. U...

In this post I want to make the game time limited. By doing this, I make it more of a challenge to beat the high score. I'm going to set the time limit for a level to 30 seconds - I think that's a good amount. Also, I don't want to just dump the player straight into the action unprepared, so and I'm going to add a couple of bits of  "ceremony" before and after the gameplay to make it a nicer experience. There are a few main things that need to be added to make this happen: Add "sub" states to the Game state: intro, game and outro Intro state needs to show a countdown Game state will run the game as normal, but with a visible "timer bar" to show how long is left Outro state will show a summary of the game - score, high score, etc. Let's start with defining these states:

Now that I have an animation system, why don't I use it to try and implement a new enemy type with minimal code? I'm going to implement an XY Zapper enemy. This is an enemy that periodically spams out a horizontal or vertical laser beam that instantly fries everything in it's path. The Zapper tracks the player's position and homes in on it, which makes it hard for the player to sit still in one place on the screen. This is good as it helps to stop the player from being lazy, sitting still and exploiting holes in the bullet patterns.