Now that I’ve gotten the initial version of Space Defense Hero cleaned up a bit, the next logical question is what exactly I do now. So, I’d like to take a moment to determine future plans for projects.

Space Defense Hero, v2.0

At the top of the list is a new release of Space Defense Hero. The overall code design is rather lacking, in my opinion, and there are too many things that got cut due to time or difficulty issues towards the end of the semester.

• More accurate collision detection. Right now, the system uses two scale values to convert the automatically generated BoundingSphere into something small enough that it doesn’t (usually) look like you’re hitting empty space and damaging the target, yet large enough that you can reasonably hit the target. As a result, this is extremely inaccurate, and in places just looks bad. What I’d like to do is at least move to a BoundingBox method for most objects, which should fit better than a sphere. Lasers, the player ship, and the basic enemy ships are good examples of this. Eventually, I should be able to go as far as piecing together multiple bounding areas to more accurate describe a boss.
• Additional enemy types. I’m not terribly concerned about creating amazing looking models, since I am not very talented in that regard, but simply having enemies that do something a bit different that are easily distinguishable would be amazing. For appearance, even a simple recolor is plenty. As far as what could be different, anything like movement pattern/speed, firing pattern/speed/power, health, etc. would be nice. The main goal is to make it so that every level doesn’t seem exactly the same until the boss.
• Level Editor. On a related note, it’d be nice to have a level editor, so I could move away from the random level generation. While random is nice in some ways (no two levels will be exactly the same, from a practical standpoint), it makes it difficult to effectively ramp up the difficulty. Also, it’d be really cool do have a setup where enemies appear to fly in a set formation. As long as things are random, that can’t happen. Of course, this opens up other issues, as well. Unless I decide I’m content to have everything be in the same place for every play through, there will need to be enough different possibilities for each level that it’s unique for each game.

Of course, all of those things are secondary issues compared to reorganizing the code to more effectively let me implement those things. Enemy types, in particular, are extremely annoying/difficult to deal with in the current incarnation.

Side-scrolling Platform Game

Once I get SDH in a state that I’m pretty happy with, I’d like to take some time to design and implement a platform game, like the old Mario games. Of course, I haven’t started any design for it yet, so I don’t have a clue where it might take me, but the style seems like a natural next step from a side-scrolling space shooter. It gives me the opportunity to start working with physics and terrain (and the collision detection involved).

Tile-based Role Playing Game

As my senior project in high school, I wrote up the design for a game, titled High School RPG. The basic premise was a RPG that used the stereotypes of high school, like the jocks, nerds, etc., rather than your typical classes. Of course, they’d all have rough counterparts, but the flavor would be something different that I haven’t seen before. I still have the design information around here somewhere, and would like to go back and actually implement the game, just to say I finished it.

After finishing up some 2D projects, I’ll probably try to get something fully 3D done. But that’s probably a long way off.