The BitBull Blog

Tidying up some loose ends that were annoying me before I can (finally!) start work on some new enemy types!

1. Fixed ‘Invisible JetBoard’ Bug
If the player destroyed an enemy whilst it was teleporting in the enemy’s jetboard would remain static and invisible in the world. Fixed this so that a teleporting enemy’s jetboard drops down properly.

2. Cropped Jetboard Bug
This one had been ‘bugging’ (groan) me for some time, it appeared that enemy jetboards were getting randomly cropped on occasion for no apparent reason. Turned out that it was a crop at all but the board wasn’t always orientating correctly when the enemy changed direction.

3. Particles Going Weird On Level Exit
You can see this issue at the end of the video here. To get the level transform effect I render the entire world to a back buffer and then apply a custom shader when rendering to screen – turns out that optimisations I made to my particle system meant I was rendering direct to screen all the time and ignoring the back buffer (oops).

4. Various ‘End Of Life’ Bugs
There were various problems to do with a player getting killed when already dead and controls still operating the jetboard when the player was dead – these were largely to do with the fact that enemies continue shooting at the player even when he’s already dead ‘just to make sure’. I like this though, it’s funny, so I kept it and fixed the bugs.

5. Disallow Enemy Abductions/Mutations When Player Dead
Not really a ‘bug’ per se but I didn’t like the fact that enemies could carry on abducting babies and mutating when the player couldn’t do anything about it – it didn’t seem ‘fair’ somehow. Now they just hover when the player is in the ‘lost life’ state which, though it doesn’t make logical sense, seem to work from a gameplay perspective.

6. Add Floating Scores
I just like these and nearly always put them in my games – something very old school arcade’ about them.

7. Improve AI In Small Gaps
Enemies were doing some pretty stupid things when the player took cover in a gap between two buildings. This was the result of an algorithm I wrote to calculate the closest building to the player which didn’t work properly, and part of the AI which tries to move away from the player if overlapping (ie avoid ‘kamikaze’ style behaviour). Now, when in a small gap, the enemy should move to the edge of the building that’s furthest from the player, turn around and start firing. It’s tricky to get this stuff right and fixing this took a while!

8. Improve Message Font
This was probably the bulk of the work. Previous in-game messages appeared on the scanner – I didn’t like this for two reasons; it got in the way of the action on the scanner and it necessitated the use of a very small font which made the messages unclear. Double fail. I have moved messages to the main game area which seems to work OK, designed a custom bitmap font for them based on the font I’m using for the HUD (but smaller), and also added ‘impact shader’ effects. Still a bit worried about them getting in the way of the action but actually it seems to work OK (I tried placing them over the ‘ground’ at the bottom of the screen as well but this didn’t seem to work so well).

Dev Time: 2.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 54.5 days

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