Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
create Flak Cannon. In the process of making Flak Cannon, we covered many ways that you
could update and alter the game to make it something entirely new.
If you start twiddling with the game to see how you can alter it, the best places to start are the
difficulty settings.
numEnemies
and
enemyWaveDelay
are prime candidates, as they will set how
many
Enemy
planes arrive and how quickly they show up. As soon as you change those values,
you might want to alter
startShots
and
scoreNeededForExtraShip
to see how they affect the
game. You can go crazy with these values. Set them impossibly high or impossibly low. A good
way to see how hard a game can be is to set the value to what you think are maximum possible
for the game and then scale them back until you find something playable.
Flak Cannon could be improved in a few ways that go beyond tweaking the variables. What could
we do to fix up the game and make it better? Well, there is probably an infinite list of things that
could be done, be here are a couple obvious ones:
More difficulty settings
: There are still a few places where magic numbers are used
(e.g., the value of a
BonusPlane
and the bonus points awarded at the end of level for
shots
remaining) that could be turned into difficulty settings updated by the level value in
newLevel()
. We have left these for you to update and explore.
Reserve ships
: When all three ships get destroyed but the player has earned a reserve
ship, the game continues until the level is over and then awards the extra ship for the
next level. Functionally, this is exactly like the game Missile Command, but in practice, it
seems bit weird. One idea would be to pause the game and allow the extra ship to enter
the screen and then resume play. Another would be to send the game into a space
mode, an alternate universe that can only escaped by fulfilling a particular goal, similar
to the arcade game Defender.
Ships fire
: Instead of an off-screen cannon, you could instead have the ships fire at the
planes themselves. You could do this in many ways. You could assign a key press for
each ship or have the ship closest to the crosshairs fire a shot. Alternatively, you could
have the shots fire automatically.
Different enemy planes
: Flak Cannon has only one
Enemy
. We randomized the way the
enemy planes fly on the screen, but they always look the same and always take one hit
to destroy. Adding different graphics for other enemies and increasing the number of hits
they take before they are destroyed would not be very difficult and would add immensely
to the game experience.
