Games design - Eighth entry

This week, I focused on a variety of different coding elements to help bring my game closer and closer to being finished. I focused on adding a new enemy and coding in the various upgrades and visual differences that they will bring. This involved making a system that allows the player controlled sprite to be deleted and replaced with one very similar without the player noticing.

The first and most important thing I created for this week was the replacement system that allows for sprite and animations transitions without the player noticing. This allows me to replace the player sprite with an upgrade animation when an animation is picked up and then that animation with the final upgraded sprite. This also allows me to replace the player sprite with an explosion when he loses a life and then place a flying back in animation at a pre-determind location. This allowed me to create a variety of upgrades for the player and have a pickup replace the player sprite with an animation of the upgrade upgrading, and then that with the final upgraded sprite with its new attributes. With this system, I created three different upgrades that will drop randomly from various enemy's depending on how hard they are to kill. 

I also created a new enemy that fly's towards the players side of the screen slower than the pattern flyer but shoots a bullet every 2-4 seconds and takes two hits to kill (One if its the missile). This enemy will be placed less sparsely than the pattern flyer but it will be done in locations that force the player to move in the way of the pattern flyer's, increasing the challenge.

For next weeks work, I want to implement the final enemy type, a boss and some menus, which should finish off the programming aspects of my game.