So we are carefully approaching the creeping doom that is the beta. The zombie model for our game. Maybe doom would be a bit harsh but it is an end we are working towards.
Anyway this week I have been working on implementing our second enemy for our game. The tongue enemy. This enemy is supposed to stay stationary on the map and when a player is within a certain distance it will shoot out its tongue. This tongue will then hopefully or hopefully not for the player attach itself to the player and then retract itself towards the alien. And then the alien will begin to eat the player. This behaviour is similar to the barnacle from the great games called half life.
This enemy works like our first alien enemy. We use our room class for this one as well for reading x and y position and amount of enemies from a text file. These enemies then get the x and y coordinates and gets pushed into a vector. Game state then loads this vector for updating and drawing the enemies to the world.
I wrote previously that they work similar to the first alien enemy but that isn’t totally correct. This enemy have fewer methods in its class as it has no requirement to move towards the player or split into two enemies. And as such it only have the methods for getting it hp and other such things.
So here’s the alien in the game. Painted by our talented lead artist. For now it has another behaviours other than pointing at the direction of the player. But the tongue attack was not complete enough to be shown but will be implemented in future updates. The other behaviour is its attack animation and idle animations. So it engages its attack animation when the player I within a certain range of the alien. For now the range is 500 pixels from the player but we will have to balance that when the tongue is properly implemented but it is a work in progress. Other things to balance is how fast the tongue will be shot at the player and also how fast it will retract. If these are too fast it might be hard to kill it before it damages the player. And also the aliens hp is something we will be thinking about when balancing. But For now there exist a secondary enemy for the player to shoot and be moderately angry or scared at.