From Start to Finish Part 1

For the week, I’ll be going over a project I’m working on. This is a final project of sorts with GameDevHQ. For this project, i’ll be building a side shooter style game, that has some similarities to Gradius. Today, we will take a look at some of the features I’ve put in place for the player.
To start, let’s take a quick look at the player’s movement:

First, the size of our thrusters on the player will vary in size depending on the movement of the player. If we move forward, the flames will be larger, and moving backwards will take away the flames completely. As for the up and down movements, we will have our ship pitch up and down depending the direction we decide to move in:

Next up, let’s take a look at some of the firing methods I will be putting in place, along with the “defense” drones that will tell the player how much health they have remaining:

In this project, I’ve decided to go with a firework shot. In order to have it activated properly, I have set up an array that holds the drones, along with the shot types that I will be using. Once the laser hits 3, we switch over to our “firework” shot:

What this firework shot does is charges up while on the screen. After a second of time, the player can elect to explode it, having lasers shoot in all directions around the initial projectile:

Now that we have most of the player set up complete, I’ll be starting on building enemies within the game for us to hit, along with having the player take some damage.