Solar Fortress Chronicles:
Hours 18 – 20

Note
– I am rapid (wishful thinking) prototyping a
retro game in my spare time and keeping a diary of what I do each hour
of the project.

In the last couple weeks I have
had some major distractions
and have not been able to put much time into Solar Fortress (pronounced
Star Castle). Most of my time was spent in a couple areas: 

1. Creating the line of site
for the boss shooting. This will
be the focus of an upcoming mini tutorial in the “Program by Google”
vein that Steve has proposed for our next few tuts.
The Pixel version of the Boss missile (before tedious line translation
to coded vector) looked like this (2x size):

When there is an opening in the
walls of the concentric circle
segments surrounding the boss, he will fire this at the player (if the
player is in sight).

2. I added in a Frame counter
and memory usage indicator – also
the subject of an upcoming mini tutorial. 
3. I added in the shell of the coin mechanism for player power ups.
Currently there is only one green coin with a tile sheet that looks
like this (2x size):

These are four 20×20 frames for
the simple spin on center axis
animation. I certainly am  no artist, but this was pretty fast
and
easy. I plan to upgrade the look and add in more coins. The Green “S”
coin gives the player more shield (health bar).

4. Ace (The Super Villain), who
we have started collaborating with
on games and graphics, sent me over some code that should fix my boss
following the player properly problem, but I have had no time
to
implement it yet. That will be part of the next set of hours I spend on
this game. Those hours are coming so few and far between right now
because I have multiple projects all going at once and e3 is next week,
so that will shoot a couple days progress on all projects.

Here
is the current build. The player ship is controlled with the arrows and
space fires. The player can pick up  the coins but nothing
happens
yet. There seem to be a few small garbage collection hiccups when it
starts playing, but those end pretty quickly and then the frame rate
stays at about 60 the whole time.

http://images/blog/solar_fortress/Solarfortress_hours18_20.swf