Blog Update 2 - Alpha Game Prototype

Update
Its been a while since the last update and my game is currently at an alpha stage. There is game play inside but for my module I had to make an engine and not necessarily a game. I intend to carry on with this project and see where I can go with it.

Game Features
In the game at its current form there are enemies which spawn in waves as well as a boss enemy. You can walk around the level and place towers to kill these enemies. I intend to give the character a gun as well as having multiple towers and having a persistent upgrade system for the character.

Bugs bugs bugs

The game is currently quite buggy and has some glitches. These are all displayed in the video below. Firstly is my mapped world is still to be finished. This means the towers move when you move if you go past their current position. The mapped world was working in a previous state but broke when I tried to move the declaration of the onscreen co-ordinates. Secondly the enemy health doesn't work as intented. Personally I think that it works but they are being hit by 'dead' bullets and are therefore taking damage. This is a easy fix within bullet creation.

Going Forward

I will continue to progress this game as a side project to see where it can go and to see what I can learn from it. It will be slow progress due to starting my second semester at uni and getting whole new assignments related to that. My goal is by summer 2017 I have a beta version of a game 

Blog Update 1 - World model and animation

World and Entities
Up to this point I've been working on the game for nearly 2 months. I've got the basics sorted and now moved onto creating a world model with entities. I have all my visuals happening in their own classes with the world class calling them. In addition I have entity class setup with child classes of these which inherit from the base class. These will be things such as a player, enemy, bullet etc.

Showing the main.cpp calling world functions

Animation
I've had basic texture blitting to the screen for a while but to make it animate I had to adjust the function to accept frames and also to only render a specific part of an image. I have to do this because each animation is on a single image. Next I created an Enum class to hold states to what animation should be playing. Heres an example of it working. All images are placeholders at the moment so you see some glitchyness.

HAPI libary provided by Keith Ditchburn - Teesside University
Images used - http://opengameart.org/content/blocky