The BitBull Blog

I want to have enemies on jetboards.

I didn’t really think about this at first – I thought that the enemies would be your usual SHMUP fare, different types of robots/spaceships and the like. But as the game’s called ‘Jetboard Joust’ it makes more sense to have at least some of the enemies riding jetboards like the player.

I’d also been thinking about the rpg-lite elements to the game. There’s going to be different ways to arm your jetboard and a weapon upgrade system – if I treated the enemies and jetboards differently I’d end up with far more combinations of opponent which would make things much more interesting. I guess its been Dark Souls (again) making me mull over this – the way the same basic enemy can present a very different challenge depending what weapon they’re armed with and what armour they’re wearing.

So I’ve been pulling apart my class structure to get something that’s much more flexible. First step was to create a generic ‘Board’ and ‘Rider’ class that represent, at the most basic level, a board and something that rides it. I then created the (somewhat randomly named) Surfer class which defines a Rider that animates in a similar way to the main player character (based on a 3×3 grid as described here). I split out a separate Jetboard class which extends Board – this contains the code for the ‘jetboard as weapon’ functionality which will probably only be available to the main character (as I think having enemies jumping off their jetboards will become too visually complex and confusing). There’s also a separate Weapon class which represents the base level weapon attachment for a board.

The fly in the ointment was with the enemy classes. There’s a bunch of generic ‘enemy’ code that deals with things like player collisions and collisions with projectiles. I couldn’t find a way to share this between enemies that were subclasses of Surfer and those that weren’t (ie won’t be riding jetboards) so I’ve had to (annoyingly) duplicate some of this in the EnemySurfer and GenericEnemy classes. There’s an IEnemy interface that allows both of these to be treated generically by various methods. Not having multiple inheritance is both a blessing and a curse sometimes.

Oh yeah, the base level Character class defines something that has health and can collide with the player and/or projectiles.

This all took some time – I hate retrofitting class hierarchies – but I took it slowly and carefully and once I was all done everything (amazingly) worked fine apart from one minor bug which was fairly easily quashed.

I’ve also designed my first jetboarding enemy – calling him ‘Skullhead’ for now.

Next step will be to add some basic enemy AI and get weapon attachments working.

Dev Time: 1.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 26 days

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