Making a shmup

[evilbutterfly]

In case you hadn't read the thread where I asked about hit detection, I'm making a game in Java. I knew basically nothing about GUI stuff before starting this, but I found a nice guide to making a simple Space Invaders sort of game. Here it is, if you're interested (be warned: it's translated from Spanish, so some of the things in the code won't immediately make sense to you. Like, he named one variable 'ventana' instead of 'window'. The guide itself is in English, but the code isn't).

Anywho, I'm just making this thread to keep you all updated on my progress with the game. I have in mind what all I want by the final version. Basically, it's a standard shmup, but instead of getting weapon upgrades (well, there may be some, I haven't quite decided) your weapons level up through use. You have 3 weapons (red, blue, green) that you can cycle through. Red = bullets, Blue = laser, Green = homing shots. I want the three to be balanced and useful so that you won't just use one and ignore the rest (aka: No E. Laser from Gradius 3). I plan to have scrolling levels and bosses and for the game to be played in an applet from a website, but that's a bit in the future.

I've been making pretty steady progress, but I hit walls sometimes because this is pretty much my first attempt at making a game in Java. I mainly just used that tutorial to set up the GUI (because the college refuses to teach us anything about GUIs). I've since changed a lot of the crap around because 1) I didn't like how he did some things, 2) his stuff didn't allow for things I needed to do, 3) efficiency (at least I think my things are more efficient). If you look at his screenshot and mine you'll see a glimpse of the changes. Warning, though, my graphics are BAD, because they're not my focus right now, getting bombass gameplay is. =P

Speaking of screenshots, here are a couple:


Maxed out red weapon (yes, those are block enemies, stfu). You can tell I hadn't gotten too far at this point. The exp bars and such for blue/green are missing. XD


Maxed out blue weapon. Lasers <3


Sitting in the corner being a cheapass with the green weapon. =P

It looks a lot better in motion, cuz you can sorta look past the craptastic graphics. Then again, when playing you have to deal with the craptastic sound. x____x;; I will let you guys know when I add more stuff. I'm not sure what to start on now that I've basically finished the weapon systems. I'll prolly work on expanding the enemy class to make room for bosses and more advanced enemies (those boxes just move up and down and shoot randomly). I have a running list of enemy types I plan to create. After I get a few types then I'll prolly work on making them come in waves (as it is there are 10 and they just respawn as soon as you kill them). With that framework in place then I may finally get a scrolling level to play through.

But yeah, any comments/suggestions? I always love feedback, and I wish I knew how to do applets so I could throw this on a site and let you guys try playing around with it yourselves, but for now any ideas for gameplay/enemies/whatever would be nice. Hell, even "Noah you're awesome" would be nice. =P And btw, I plan to ask people I know around here and IRL if they'd mind making nicer looking enemies/backgrounds/etc later on (I'd hate to be fighting boxes forever, haha), cuz I'm REALLY not artistic at all. For now, though, boxes and triangles ftw. =P