Day 8 i think
At this point I'm just blatantly putting off working on the hard stuff. I added my "tough" enemy type that requires two hits to destroy. It is simply a recolored version of the original sprite. When it gets hit, it changes "class" to the simple enemy type, and is drawn and tracked thusly.
That was okay, but what I really enjoyed tonight was working on the "feel." I hated the way enemies just dissapeared with no fanfare. I'm trying to keep it simple here, but it was driving me nuts, and like I said before I didn't really feel like getting into the hard mechanics of the game.
I'm no good at the sound stuff, straight up. I'm pretty much guessing. But in the process of "guessing" for the sound of destroying a ship, I ended up coming up with a pleasing sound for firing a bullet. So I added that, as well as a "thud" sound for hitting tough enemies and an "explosion" sound for hitting simple enemies.
I was gonna call it there, but it was driving me nuts, again, how the enemies just dissapeared. It was even worse because there was this long explosion noise but no real visual signifier of what that noise is. This led to fun with drawing "explosions." I created a new table to track explosions and, when an enemy is destroyed, I find the center position of the sprite and save it along with a "lifespan." The lifespan signifies how long the explosion should remain on screen. For each frame that passes, the explosion's lifespan increments. If the lifespan is less than my arbitrarily set count of frames, it remains in the table and is drawn as normal. But when it hits that point (currently 15 frames), it is deleted from the table and removed.
If I end up with some polish time (unlikely at this rate), I'll try to make it a little flashier. For now though, I'm glad that it actually looks kind of like something is happening. The gif only tells half the tale, the sound takes it another level.
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