I like the idea of including a few homages to the classic arcade shooters of yesteryear in Jetboard Joust, and as ‘Space Invaders’ was really the granddaddy of them all it’s an obvious choice. I wasn’t sure whether the formation/movement of the invaders would work within the horizontal/scrolling format of Jetboard Joust but, with a few tweaks, it actually seemed to work out pretty well.
It wasn’t too tricky to code either. I was worried that get the whole batch of invaders to move together around buildings and stuff would be a pain but it was pretty straightforward in the end.
What I do is move all the invaders as a batch rather than treating them as individual sprites. Collision detections are still handled individually and, when an invader collides with a building, it sends a message back to the batch telling it to change direction. When the batch is initiated I make sure it doesn’t take up more vertical space than the space between the highest building and the top of the screen so I know it’s never going to get stuck.
Probably the trickiest thing was deciding how to treat a batch of invaders when attacked by the ‘Gravity Hammer‘ weapon. Moving the whole batch at once would just look dumb so I needed a way of having individual enemies break formation when hammered and then return to the appropriate position once they recover.
To achieve this I have a property for each invader that stores its location within the batch separate from its position on screen. If the invader is forced to break formation it is relatively simple for it to return to its batch position. Though it wasn’t strictly necessary I also decided to have individual invaders track horizontally with the batch even when hammered (so only their vertical position is displaced). It just seemed to look better this way.
In keeping with the original I have the invader’s speed and rate of fire increase as individual invaders are destroyed.
Dev Time: 1 day
Total Dev Time: approx 160 days
Admit It – You’ve Always Wanted To Play ‘Space Invaders’ With A Flamethrower!
Using The Plasma Rifle To Dispense With A Batch Of Invaders
Using The Gravity Hammer To Break Batch Formation
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