Level Counter

Story: 60, Challenge: 0.

Friday, January 17, 2014

The Little Things

As we all know. The flying spaghetti monster is in the details. So I've been working on adding small but important features to Pachinguys.

1) Retry and next buttons added at the end of each level. Retry is needed for players who may want to repeat a level to get a better score. Clicking on the end of level screen no longer brings up the level menu, clicking on the back button returns you to the right menu screen ("story" levels or challenge levels menu), clicking on next starts the next level directly.

Obvious, but still had to be created at some point.
2) Double tap to zoom. Andengine comes handy with some great cameras. Implementing smooth zoom within a bounded play field was therefore relatively easy. You can now double tap anywhere on the play screen to zoom in and out. Double tapping on a guy or the guy spawner does not activate the zoom function. Zooming in changes the center of the camera to the location of the tap, this center is bounded in such a way that it never displays anything that is not visible on a non zoomed screen.

3) Bosses skip button. Through yet more play testing I've noticed that bosses tend to be where players quit. This is because bosses are much harder than regular levels. I happen to like the extra challenge and break in flow that bosses pose. But I realize that may not be for everyone. So I've added a permanent skip button that shows up only on boss levels and lets the player quickly skip the boss. It should provide an alternative to the "rage quit" moments bosses seem to create, that still keeps the player engaged in the game.

"art" 
I've been noticing a lot of bugs with the recently added "stop the world" mechanic, especially around retractable blocks and fire. Clearing these bugs is now the highest priority as I had believed this feature to already be complete.

On the technical side, I've started laying the groundwork for the new final boss level. It will have the ability to affect and change the play field during play. This requires some tweaking of the existing code. Going back to code that was written over a year ago can be humbling. I've learned a lot during this year as a professional developer. Code that seemed very clever a year ago now seems hacky and overly complex. And I'm sure that going back to code I'm writing now a year from now would feel the same way. Such is the fate of long personal projects.

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