I’ve come to a decision; the previous iteration of the Blast Engine had become an ungainly mess internally and the object oriented approach used was all but crippling the options for expansion; for a month now I’ve been looking at specific elements of other shoot ‘em ups and thinking to myself that it can almost handle them but not quite – and that inadequacy (as well as the need for lots of little blocks of bespoke code to fudge around the engine’s failings) has finally become too irritating to ignore.
As a result, I started a new version of the Blast Engine pretty from scratch yesterday using an “oldschool” array-based object handling system (still with the SuperStrict mode enabled in BlitzMax to keep my variable declarations on the straight and narrow) and already have a movement pattern system that is significantly more flexible than the previous one and plans for a scripted firing manager that should give the old version a serious kicking as well. At the moment, the only question being raised is how to handle bosses and a few vague but reasonable ideas have already presented themselves…
Tags: BlitzMax, game, programming, seu, shmup, shoot ‘em up