[Illari]

Illari

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This would have fitted the first session's theme better, but it still fits this theme too. The idea is that there's a round shield thingy around your ship, which is used to reflect bullets towards enemies. The enemies try to shoot you from behind you, as the shield doesn't reach all the way around your ship. The graphical style in the final game will propably be similiar to the drawing below .

[kdmiller3]

kdmiller3

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If you didn't participate in the first session, I figure this would be okay.  You are, after all "using" enemies (actually, their bullets) in an unusual way.  Still, it'd be better if you could do something interesting with the enemies themselves.

(I'm still working out what I'm going to do myself, since there's so many options and I still can't think of a good one.)

If you plan for the final game to look about like that, I'd say go all the way and give everything a lively "scribble" movement.  The easiest way would be to draw each object a few dozen times and pick drawings randomly each frame so they wiggle around, but you could also try doing it procedurally.

[Illari]

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Here's an early look at the actual game. I finally figured out how to do that motion blur effect used on many gm games, so expect extreme lag at older computers. Also it doesn't use any surfaces at all, so this may be a little uneffective way to do the effect. The reflection thingy works very well, though it's quite difficult to aim the bullets to the right direction. I actually drew the enemy ship 20 times, so it won't look too copypasted in the game.

[Illari]

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The reflection thingy works very well

I never said this. Half of the bullets pass straight through the shield, resulting unfair deaths. I have been trying to fix this for hours with little success. It doesn't really feel like you're using your foes when you die every 5 seconds. But I'll post the crappy version here anyways.

[kdmiller3]

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I don't know how you implemented bullets, but my guess is that you test for shape overlap on each simulation step and resolve any intersections.  When the player ship is moving towards a bullet, the bullet can move from outside the shield on one step to inside the shield on the next step without ever colliding.  Continuous collision detection solves that, but it's hard to implement correctly.

One special-case solution you could use is to get the bullet's position in player-local coordinates and the perform an intersection between the shield arc and the previous and current local positions.  That has the added benefit of detecting the fractional step at which the bullet actually touched the shield so you can reflect it more accurately.

[hima]

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I really like the style you're having here. But ,as you already mentioned, the reflection really need to be fixed. How do you handle the collision by the way?

[Illari]

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I finally got the reflection to work. It works far more precisely now, as it calculates how many pixels the bullet has to be moved to make the reflection look right. I haven't done anything new about the actual game, though.