Sheepy Goes 'A Shootin'

31st August 2011

Wow, quite a stroke of luck I had today. Winning 1st prize in a quiz at the work place (6 bottles of wine) and also getting a new Sheep sprite up and running. I converted the image of Shaun's sheep into Sprite Pad V1.8. It flippin' worked too. Awesome!! Once I got the sprite frames, etc.

I took on board some of Shaun's suggestions that the sheep can jump on to boxes and barrels too. I loaded up Arkitec and checked out which characters should be used to make the sheep jump on to the barrels. I added the characters, which represented the value of the character sets that form the boxes and barrels. I also managed to get the jump routine working slightly better. The player cannot jump too high in one go. The player can also jump outside of the game screen :)

Now the bulk of the background scrolling / collision code was virtually finished. I decided to work on getting some nice effects into the game. Well, not really effects, just explosions. This is for when the player shoots an enemy. It will then stop the enemy and let the enemies that get shot, explode. Then after the animation, remove the enemy off screen. I had to program an animation engine per enemy for this, because if I actually made the explosion animation on the player's bullet. It just wouldn't work right - plus there'd be a delay with the bullet firing. Since I was happy with the enemy blasting and the enemies are exploding quite nicely. I decided to call it a day with this game. For today. :)

The next task (Which will be some time this weekend) will be to get the enemies shooting bullets in one of 3 directions. Also I will be working on enemy movement formations, according to a random table (Depending on what the enemies will be). Stay tuned on Sunday, to see what happens. :)