V0.02 – Enter the Intelligens

I took some more time to do some experimentation/playing with FNA (Monogame-SDL2) last night, and added some features to my Space Invaders clone.

• Scrolling starfield background
  • Backgrounds are loaded from Tiled files via TiledSharp and controlled by a basic tile engine I started.
    • TiledSharp looks like it could use some updates/patching.  It did not like the way the tileset source image was embedded in a file I created with the current version of Tiled, and I had to massage the data by hand.
• Armada is now loaded from an XML file.
  • Alien formation is controlled via offsets from center now, so next levels can be more complicated.  Think like the Phoenix birds in the formation of a bird shape.  This will make it easier to add Galaxians and other types of levels.
  • Firing is no longer controlled by an array that picks lowest alien.  Aliens each calculate their own firing solutions and can determine if there are other aliens blocking them.
  • To test armada loading, I created a new Armada:  The Intelligens, based on the old Intellivision Space Armada game.
• Added a camera class to make dealing with maps easier, also adds rotation and zoom, though I’m not using them in-game yet.
• Graphics is now rendered at 3x higher resolution to render target.
  • It didn’t take long to realize that the native resolution of Space Invaders would be too low to add some of the aliens I wanted to add from later games to this homage.  I scaled up all the existing graphics with a single ImageMagick convert command.  I used point sampling, so that the aliens would retain their same blocky, low-rez, look.
• Levels are now shown in a style like the old Namco games.  I threw some cherries in there as placeholders until I can create some other items.