We're back, hurray!
Hope you all had a good Christmas and got lots of new things to play with ( Left 4 Dead was the best thing Santa gave me, it's the best marriage of "proper game" and multi-player I've ever ever seen. Everyone is going to copy that soon and just ditch the single player mode all together ).
I'm still in a holiday frame of mind, so the posts here may be sporadic as I alternate between working, and eating crap food / watching tv ( I think Olli's the same too ).
There's a new
update to X. This is more of a "presentation" build, where I just can't be bothered to try and code anything clever.
The pause mode is in, which is always a nice thing to have done. To try and make it less drab, there's a bit of eye-candy in there, which is a
Lorenz Attractor and was ported to as3 from the code at the always excellent
Levitated ( I had played with this a couple of weeks ago using setPixel, and just wasn't happy with the results. Rather than let it go to waste I used the bubbles from the
depth of field vector effect in 651 and a bit of blur and the add blendmode along with the old faithful
infinite bob effect, and it looks ok-ish now. One thought that came to me was the code may be handy for running some types of baddies, could be quite a nice movement pattern and wouldn't require me to think of any more code ).
One thing is that I don't kill the animation during pause, so asteroids keep spinning, explosions keep exploding. This is because the use of movieclips is only a temporary measure, I'm going to wait til we've got final assets before ripping that code out and using tilesheets instead.
The other major chunk of work done is the stats / medals. The medals needs some images drawing for them, and then code to actually trigger them in-game, but all the internal guts is in there. The stats I think are done now, which is cool. Just don't get too attached to them, as every new build will reset them.
I've also added some stats to the level complete section ( I've been brainwashed waiting for things to load on the 360, where they display tips / stats to help you forget you're waiting ) which I'm really happy with.
Following on from a comment from Tonypa, the current level is now displayed, and a level progress bar. I've noticed a lot of casual games show the level progress ( Zuma, Luxor2 etc. ) and it's a simple nice thing to have. It's maybe not that useful now, but perhaps if the asteroids were to come in waves later in the game ( That's a clue btw ) ?
Squize.