I know my memory is getting worse but this is ridiculous… okay, there have been swathes of changes to the Blast Engine’s internal workings over the last couple of days but, because they’re all little incremental things, I haven’t blogged about them – so instead, here’s a round- up of the Blast Engine News [shuffles papers, puts on a pseudo-serious face].
A jump command has been strapped into the timeline that can be unconditional and simply leap from point A to B or be told to only do so if a specific object exists; this means that background movement can be looped and doesn’t have to stop during boss fights unless I actually want it to. There are several firing modes added into the system as well and it happily sprays bullets around in interesting patterns during the test level. This managed to produce bizarre problem (the conditional jump to jammed on because the bullets had somehow inherited the name of the object that fired them) which was subsequently “fixed” by doing the equivalent of stamping all over the little darling’s array entries before assigning it as a bullet. Another firing-related issue that makes one bullet in about eighty spawn just a fraction of a second later than the others being fired during the same frame hasn’t entirely been eradicated yet but I’m beginning to suspect a rounding issue and have no idea at this point if it’s mine or the compiler!
On the cosmetic front, the particle effects for explosions have been tuned a little so that smaller bangs don’t get too energetic and larger ones for bosses have a bit more muscle – objects can also become particle emitters, although that needs a bit more work so that they can specify the ferocity at which they spawn since right now it’s all hard wired to “bonkers”. Enemies strobe red when they take a hit (they were already spitting out some particles on non-terminal hits, but the number has been dialled down to avoid burying things) and will flash repeatedly when they’re close to being destroyed. There’s a proper shadow generation system as well and, if an object specifies a distance away from itself, the engine renders it a drop shadow based on the object’s own shape – the video in the previous post has the bridges already displaying shadows but that was a fudge using a transparent area bolted onto the image itself, this solution is far more elegant and indeed efficient.
So now there are only four major items on my “to do” list; put in some proper object-by-object scoring rather than the fixed values currently being added, get the entire game running actually as a game with titles page, game start, game over sequences and so forth, install smart bomb handling (which in turn means an upgrading of the bullet handling, but that’s been on the cards for ages now) and separating the graphics data from the object arrays so that a proper animation driver can be slotted in. After that, the bludgeoning of any errors that are almost certain to stick their heads above the battlements in the process and a few other cosmetic modifications such as muzzle flashes for the player’s guns, it should be close to the point where I can start thinking about specific game design rather than it being engine work where I’m constantly trying to second guess what features will at some point be needed – that’s a momentous occasion because this’ll be the first iteration of the Blast Engine to get that far!