Week 4

Hello all! As most of you know, my blog and Alex's got blog of the week last week, which is super exciting! Hopefully I can keep it up in the weeks to follow! This week began with a decision to extend the previously-completed level one by adding an underground portion. As I began to work on the design specifics of the lower level, Alex began working on a game over condition, where if the player died, some game over screen would be shown (as of right now, it only shows the title screen, as we have not designed the game over screen. However, as we began testing this, we noticed that our player character would simply fall into the newly-created lower level of the first level instead of dying when falling through our pit hazards. I determined I could fix this problem by simply adding other hazards that don't involve falling, like spikes. However, this opened up an entire new can of worms.

In order to make the spikes hurt the player character, I figured I would need to make them into EnemyEntities, and simply eschew using an image other than the spikes in the tileset. However, this did not work, since the EnemyEntity class called for an image, and wouldn't work without one. I attempted making a new class that extended the EnemyEntity class with modifications, but it wouldn't work with the object pooling function in the MelonJS engine. Next week, I intend to delve deeper than I ever have before: inside the MelonJS engine source code itself, to attempt to determine what's making the existing entity classes pool and my new ones not pool.

Until next week, keep playing our game! :D

http://frobotgame.com/