20 AUG 2022:
I ended up scrapping the idea of showing the bombs on the bomber. Yes, it would have been more realistic that way, but it would have also caused the following problems:
1) One of the bombs would have to be "closer" to the player than the other to look correct.
2) The bombs would have to be uniquely positioned on each one of the four types of bombers.
3) The bomber logic would be more complicated.
Instead, I thought of a color-coded system to warn the player of when the bombs would be dropped. Originally I was going to use Red, Yellow and Green. It worked, but I quickly found out that having so many colors was quite the distraction -- as soon as you see the color Yellow and start to realize that it means caution, it has already transitioned to Green meaning a bomb has been dropped. So I got rid of Yellow and now you have the Bomber you see above. Red when it is not dropping a bomb and Green when it is. Even Santa approves of this bomber!
I was hoping to get more done this week and then . . . BUG!
This one was really nasty and actually ended up being TWO BUGS that required video captures, log files and Notepad++ to finally figure it out.
1) The bombs wouldn't even draw to the screen!
2) The bombs would reset much earlier than they should.
The cause of the first bug was that I had an "EXIT FOR" command that ended a FOR-NEXT loop prematurely. So the code that needed to run to initialize some of the bomb variables was completely ignored.
The cause of the second bug was that I had set the bombs to reset based on the status of the bomber and not the bomb itself.
So a lesson learned here is: Check to make sure your starting conditions are working properly. If not, then everything downstream is going to be affected.
But now that that's fixed, Scrapship now has bombers that attack from the 4 corners of the screen, provide a little bit of warning when they're about to attack, and all the bombers can be blown to pieces. Isn't that what we all want in life?
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"I GET to do this." -- Eva zu Beck
For the context behind this quote, see her Instagram post here.
As always, thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!