Game in a Weekend – Day 3

Goods news: apparently tomorrow is Victoria day (stat holiday), meaning this “game in a weekend” is actually “game in a long weekend”. I’ve got most of the game set up so I’ll be able to spend tomorrow ironing out bugs and adding content to the game. My game is currently in a playable state, to the point where it’s actually kind of difficult (try it yourself above – I swear it’s not a virus, I’ve just zipped the .exe and the two necessary .dll files). Here’s what the game currently looks like:

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Pretty cool, aye?

Originally I was planning on having the game as more of an adventure scroller, where you collect coins and powerups as you progress, but now I’m considering making it more of a puzzler – you get given a certain number of shots and shields, and you then have to complete the level. I’d still like to implement a powerup system, though, so I’ll have to think about how those two things can tie together (maybe they can’t).

I accomplished most of my goals for the day, mostly getting the graphics to look pretty (isn’t it pretty??). Tomorrow the one added functionality I’d like is to be able to load levels from text files that contain not only the level, but things like your number of shields and bolts, as well as saving progress to another text file. I don’t really care if it’s editable, the point is to playthrough, not to just win.

To be completely honest, I’m still kind of mucking around. I understand how to code the basic things in C++ but I’m definitely not optimising it properly. For example, when an Entity dies, instead of deleting it from memory, my code simply “shuts it off”, leaving it in the array of Entities. This is definitely not ideal, but the alternative would have been more complex than I wanted it to be so I’ve left it how it is for now. Being able to control memory with C++ is definitely making me notice where I’m using it and what I’m using it on. I’m getting the impression that most games pass around a lot of pointers in functions and very rarely do actual objects change hands.

As always, the game’s code is here: https://github.com/taurheim/ASCIIscroller