04/07/2017 Progress Report

What's Working:

• Pattern selection system prototype working
• Score/Wave causing pattern to change
• Specific patterns can be selected based on wave number and can set to random.

What I Need To Work On:

• Improving the pattern selection to take the update cycle into account
• Modifier items
• Lives system
• Additional enemy types

Other Things I'm Doing:

• Thinking about how to improve game balance in aspects like shooting, speed, and where the objects spawn.
• Additional game mechanics (Caused via modifiers or scripting)

Future Things:

• Boss fights
• Pausing
• Sound and Music
• Art assets
• Controller support
• Saving/Loading
• Difficulty levels
• Bonus stuff

A Few Other Words:

The pattern selection sub-system has taken a lot longer than I would like to make. Initially I had it planned where I could load things from a text file, but while trying to build it I realised it was overly complicated and had multiple points of failure. So I scrapped it. Which is a same really, because it could of been an avenue for User-Generated-Content. Instead, I'm building something a bit more hard-coded, but reliable. It was much faster to get a form of that running and proving that it operates properly. However, I realised that I wanted to take the update cycle into account which would allow of interchanging patterns within the different waves, which ultimately gives me more flexibility in terms of level design. We'll see how it goes.

Once that system works, I'll probably be able to take more screenshots and stuff.