[airstrike] Airstrike levels and goal oriented game-play

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi,

On Tue, Aug 01, 2006 at 06:48:21PM +0300, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> On Tuesday 01 August 2006 16:00, Erik Auerswald wrote:
> > All the other points need to be addressed in some way. IMHO the logical
> > next step would be to add ingame info on fuel, lives, bombs and score.
> 
> This is not so simple because of the way how Airstrike currently works.

I know. That's the reason I didn't implement it in february.

> This is from a mail last summer:
> On Sunday 14 August 2005 23:16, Ulf Ekström wrote:
> > > 6) Currently game shows only information about level name, that bombs
> > > or fuel have ended and reason for level ending, but there should be
> > > indications about score and number of remaining lives, fuel and bombs.
> > > (The tricky thing about adding these is that player is an AI object,
> > > but it's biplane sprite that has these properties...)
> >
> > Don't we also have some kind of "player" object?
> 
> Yes, but number of "lives" is not associated with the "player", but the 
> generator generating the corresponding sprite types.  After player
> generator has re-generated the indicated sprite-type given number of
> times, it marks the player dead and stops.
> 
> I mean:
> - Player name and AI are stored with the "player" object
> - Spritetype and number of sprites ("lives") for the *current level* is
>   associated with the co. player generator.  The generator asks player
>   object to set AI for the generated sprite
> - Count of bombs and fuel are stored to the generated sprite
> As a result:
> - Sprite doesn't know about generator nor player
> - Generator knows about player and the sprite
> - Player knows about the AI and could know about the sprite
>   (through AI setting)
> - AI doesn't know about player or generator
> 
> So, I don't know how to deal with showing "lives".  There would also need to 
> be an additional API to retrieve the information about bombs and fuel from
> any sprite that player could control.
> 
> Scores would also be problematic.  E.g. if bullet does something, there's 
> nothing linking the bullet hit back to AI or player object.
> 
> 
> Comments?

Every biplane could have it's own set of bombs, fuel and damage
displays (the same way a missile has a target lock indicator).
Depending on the AI (player 1 or 2) the displays could be on the
left or right of the screen. Additional displays (from cloned biplanes)
could be stacked on top and fall down whenever a biplane with gauges
below dies.

That would be a start. For lives and score more needs to be done.
Shall every level define the number of initial lives (as is done now)?
Shall a player start the game with a set number of lives that is not
replenished at level start? What actions are to be rewarded with points?
And how many of them? A killed enemy could be worth 1 point or every
hitpoint lost could be counted towards the score of the adversary.

All in all we need to decide how the game should work and then we can
start implementing this. This does include rewriting what does not fit
with the then decided way.

Erik