Reflex – Dev Diary 15

This week continued some of the polishing I started and I also finished off the weapon crate work.

The weapon crate, when opened, displays the collected content on the left edge of the screen briefly – to avoid disrupting the game flow.

One aspect that was in the original Reflex game was the deployment method for the missile when it was fired. Once the launch button had been pressed (in the original) a craft flew in and launched the missile.

This was something I wanted to continue in the new version and this week I finally got round to adding it in. Initially I wanted to use a Sequence to animate the craft but in the end I found it easier to just code the movements. It involved changing how the launch pad operated so that it would wait for the craft to be in the correct place and then start the missile.

So, I had to position the craft at the correct angle and out of screen, then move it towards the launch pad (with a bit of scaling and fading in). Once it gets to the launch pad it sends a signal to it to create the missile object, and finally the ship continues forward but with a slight angular motion, scaling and fading to give the impression that it has banked away from the base and back out into space. I’m very pleased with the outcome.

Between doing all this work I started to go through each level and play through them to make sure they were actually doable. There were a few levels that needed to be tweaked because the player just didn’t have time to switch out reflectors but so far I’ve verified levels 2.1 to 2.17.