.:Game Plan:.

D and I are currently developing a new game- Space Arena Tactics. Here are some of my plans for it.

Game Creation Progress:

Today, the game was nothing at all, nothing to do, no menus to navigate, no nothing. I began working on it, and have came up with plans for the menus, 1 on 1 battling and credits. Here are the plans I (we) made up before actually starting the game.

UPDATE: There are functioning menus, and a partially functioning battle system.

The Plans:

If you click on a menu item, the text on it moves to the right, and when it goes outside the room, an outside room action occurs. EX: If begin_txt is outside room, go to room mission_type_select and etc. This object that exits, now goes to the next room, (but invisible, and unclickable), and the same form follows with the other selection menus. Before the room of the gameplay opens, questions are asked. EX: If 1 begin_txt exists, start the Mission Select Menus. The credits are a set background, with scrolling co-ordinates, and a looping function. There is also a quit function. How this works is: if it is clicked by the cursor, it moves outside the room, triggering the outside room action. The action is a question the user must answer yes or no to. If the user answers yes, a quit game action occurs. But, if no is clicked, the pop-up window closes and restarts the room.

How the battling works:

There are two characters, and two aimers, each with their own controls. If a certain button is pressed, it may trigger an action. EX: Left arrow is pressed, and triggers the move left action. The characters and aimers can move in eight directions. There is also a shooting function. When a certain button is pressed (like the spacebar) it creates a new object, which will be the bullet. When this happens, another event is triggered. The event is to tell the bullet to move to a certain point, which happens to be aimer_x and aimer_y (simply stated as, a lock-on bullet). Also when the bullet is created an additional event occurs; a timer. The timer is set for a certain amount of time that a single bullet will be destroyed (which is a simpler way of giving it range). But, the bullet can be destroyed ahead of time, either by the collision with aimer event, outside room event, or collision with the enemy. A secondary reason for having the bullets destroyed is so that the game won't lag (too many instances and that can happen). Now when the bullet collides with the enemy, you want them to lose a life, or health. When the collision occurs, an action is triggered. The enemy will get relative -10 health (loses 10 health) for example. If it wasn't set to relative, then the enemies health would drop right to 10, which isn't desired. Additionally, you need to have an action for when the health reaches 0. Generally it would be to destroy the enemy etc. Also, a gameover action is needed. Which means, that when an opponent loses all his/her lives, anaction is triggered. Usually, this is to go to a room which states the winner.

How the Ship Select Works:

There are two objects, a previous arrow, and a next arrow. What we want, is when you click on the previous arrow, the next machine/ship will appear. For the previous arrow, it is exactly the opposite. EX: The current ship is Blue Fire (not a name used in the game), and you press the next arrow to see the other ship. And you don't like its stats, so you press previous arrow to go back to the other one. Now how exactly this works is, when you click on the (next) arrow, a check is made, if the current ship is blu_fire_ship, the designated ship supposed to take its place will appear, while _blu_fire_ship disappears. For the previous arrow, it is exactly the opposite effect. Now usually, to add some "style", you may want the arrow to make a sound, invert, change colours etc. For it to play a sound, an action is required. This action combined with the event is: when next_arrow_default is left-clicked on by the cursor, a sound will play (arrow_clicked for example). If you want it to invert, you will need a different sprite for its altered form. Now, alter_arrow_nex needs to transform back into the original arrow. To do this, the event left click released is needed. Now in that event, there is an action (change object into: arrow_next). This will transform it back into its original state. This is all the progress so far, so I won't be explaining any more. But, hopefully this gave you a better understanding of how a game works.