The latest progress is within areas where I usually tell myself “Oh, I’ll do that tomorrow”. Detail stuff. I’ve added a couple of states to the Player ship object. “Invulnerable” is one state. This comes into effect whenever you lose a life. You’ll be invulnerable for a couple of seconds, and the graphics display a blinking ship as indication. It’s a classic :) The other state is “AutoPilot”. This basically means that the Player ship object is unresponsive to keystrokes that would normally cause the ship to move or fire. This is useful together with “Invulnerable” whenever the ship enters a new level (It’s a detail, but I always liked that the ship actually entered the screen and positioned itself, and not only “popped up” in the middle of the screen suddenly). Additionally, the “AutoPilot” will be useful in scripted parts of levels.
In addition, I’ve finally added ship-to-ship collisions properly, and most enemies have a score now ;)
Oh yes, and the game can be paused now.
So, alot of small and seemingly insignificant things, but they make everything appear a whole lot better.
How does the 2-player work? Is it hotseat (on the same computer) or LAN/internet based?
If it’s hotseat how do you split the controls between the players? :-)
The 2-player will be good old hotseat action!
The controls will be split (by default) so that one player uses a WASD configuration, while the other uses arrow keys.
However, I would like to implement a key mapper of sorts as well, so that players can customize this themselves. (I make no promises though, depends on our patience ;)
Further, the Score is a combined score of 1-player and 2-player, and the same goes for the lives. Both player 1 and 2 will use the same pool, so it’s both players’ interest to keep the other alive ;-)