The end of the year is almost here and distractions are a plenty. Well, distractions in my life are always a plenty, which is why I rarely post anything. A few weeks back, using the knowledge I’d gained from tinkering with Flixel, I started work on what is to become my first real game. I chose a simple (and quite overly populated) genre: the shoot ’em up.
The ground work of the game went together fairly quickly: Basic menus, player movement and firing, enemies spawning and attacking, damage and death, lives and game over, particle emitters for hits, the heads up display, and more.
I knew I had to optimize things a little bit or the game would eventually lag to complete halt. Rather than having new shots, enemies, emitters created over and over, which is a big no-no, I only have them created if absolutely necessary; dead sprites are recycled otherwise. This will help keep the memory usage lower and not lag the game so much.
Long story short though, I haven’t worked on it very much because of those distractions I was talking about. But I’m now back in action as of yesterday and am going to be working to get more of this game put together so that it can eventually see the light of day.
My next goal is to get the player’s weapon energy system implemented as well as other powerups, like lives and ammo.