So after strapping a background scroller into the Blast Engine and getting half an editor written for it… I’ve just stripped it all back out again in order to pursue some ridiculous plan of generating the backgrounds using large sprites! Oh the humanity. On the plus side, this does remove the need for the hideous and cobbled-together bespoke editor and has made adding parallax scrolling, horizontal panning and spot details a lot easier so maybe it’s not an entirely mental decision.
A new object expiration feature which removes objects at a specified timeline value means that warning messages for enemies coming in from the bottom of the screen or “boss approaching” alerts can be added – I have one of the latter in as test and it seems to work okay. One thing the object system can’t do just yet is allow spawning objects to request a sound effect; jets arriving in a hurry could “whoosh” into the play area, the end of level boss warning could trigger it’s own klaxon sound or ask for the music to be faded out, the boss itself could request that the boss music start…. all very nice of course, but as it stands there’s no sound handling at all in the engine so these features will have to wait until they’ve been implemented!
But the first job to be done tomorrow (well okay, today) is add text rendering over the rest of the layers of game stuff to put up the status bars; right now the “game” isn’t keeping score and it’s probably time to start. I also need to strap in a temporary titles page and some lives handling just to get a proper game loop going… oh joy of joys, housekeeping jobs!
Tags: BlitzMax, game, programming, seu, shmup, shoot ‘em up