The BitBull Blog

Another case of #gamedev pottering here as I started work on one thing and got pretty much distracted with another. It was a constructive distraction though and has provided me with plenty of re-useable code so I’m not beating myself up about it.

I started work on the animation for falling off the Jetboard and got it to a stage where I was pretty happy with it, then thought it would look better if I added some dust as the player hits the floor. I decided to use the basic particle generator I’d created for the enemy explosions and added some additional functionality such as the ability to animate particles, apply gravity, and restrict the angle at which particles are fired.

This worked, but in the process of testing I accidentally had the dust particles generated whenever the jetboard landed on anything – and it looked good! Decided to refine this which meant quite a few changes to the particle generator – mainly the ability for one generator to manage particles generated from several locations (to save the costly instantiation of a new generator every time I need some dust). Pretty pleased with the results though the parameters still need a bit of tweaking – some of that dust is getting flung rather too far!

Next up was working on the collision detection and figuring out the various ways you can be knocked off your jetboard. I’ve pretty much nabbed the collision detection from ‘Attack Of Giant Jumping Man’ which has saved a bunch of time and I think I’m going to restrict items you can interact with to simple static platforms as this is a SHMUP in essence, not a platformer.

So, other than colliding with enemies, there’s three ways that you and your jetboard can become separated…

1. Jetboard hits obstacle mid-jump, player still moving freely
2. Player hits obstacle mid-jump, jetboard still moving freely
3. Player hits obstacle whilst in flight, jetboard moves freely

…I also had to cover the occurrence where both player and jetboard come into contact with the same obstacle mid-jump. In this instance (I think) it’s reasonable that the player is able to land on the jetboard and recover though I may restrict this based on how far the player falls.

I’m still not entirely happy with some of the player falling animations but we’re getting there. Probably going to bit a bit of a break from this now whilst I work on ‘Attack Of Giant Jumping Man’ for a bit. Next up will be implementing a simple ‘lose life/retry’ loop.

Dev Time: 1.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 8.5 days

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