BecomeAPatron

Titan Attacks mobile – Developer Diary #7: MARS!

I’m back and the game is progressing well!

Since the last update in August I finished and shipped Spooky Bonus and it was a smash hit on the casual download portals!

Spooky Bonus’s success was a big relief for me because the reason I made it this summer/autumn instead of finishing Titan Attacks mobile was that I had completely run out of money and was rapidly going into debt. I couldn’t be sure how much money Titan Attacks mobile would in the current mobile market, and I had to bet on a safe win – and that win was Spooky Bonus.

Anyway, the good news is that I’m only working on Titan Attacks now until it’s done, and I expect that to be mid-January.

Video!

I made a quick video talking about the various Moon enemy behaviours I added and showing off the Mars world with the “Galaxian” style enemies. Take a look:

New Features

Here’s some more detail about the work I did:

– Square Rotation behaviour done. Can be first seen on level 24 (Moon world)
– Random behaviour done. Can be first seen on level 37 (Moon world)
– Lurch behaviour done. First seen on level 31 (Moon world)
– Divebomb behaviour done First seen on level 36 (Moon world)
– Verified all moon anims/sprites/enemy bullets work correctly and that levels are correct.
– Read in hotspots file which defines off-centre handles for the x/y coords of sprites. This means that the alien bullets and bombs appear and disappear at the correct y coordinates for example.
– Made Total Multiplier (an internal number) and Multiplier (visible to player) affect the starting position of enemies.
– Added in all Mars graphics, animations, enemies, bullets, levels.
– Galaxian behaviour done for Mars. Was quite a lot of work to get right! Cas used Yakly degrees (0-65535 for a complete circle) in a 16:16 fixed point number format to calculate all of the angles quickly (this was important for slow PCs back in 2003), but my engine didn’t support those. Now the port uses Radians, Yakly degrees, and plain old degrees. Crazy!

Next Up

– Titan Graphics and centipede behaviour
– Finish loose ends in the gidrah (enemy) class and behaviour class
– Laserbrain! (this isn’t as exciting as it sounds.)
– Animation loose ends (support a few extra XML animation commands)
– Bosses with turrets and health bars
– Player tank with all upgrades

Comments are closed.