In this weeks development report I will go through the creation of the sonar beam artifact, its purposes in the game and how I made it in c++ with visual studio.
What the sonar beam is: The sonar beam is teams 12 games only projectile. It is a projectile which will travel from the player through out the screen, clearing and destroying all of the enemies present on the current screen. The sonar wave will be what is called a ”smart bomb”, a screen clearer. It will act like a power up in the sense that it is available at all times.
Why I made the sonar beam: In order to finish the design course and pass the assignment each game was required to have a projectile in the game. At first we did not have a projectile in our game and we had some troubles deciding on how we would implement the projectile. We ended up with the sonar beam because of these reasons:
1. The game play will be quick and action packed and the player will be put into hard situations, having a screen clearing bomb will help players get some breathing room.
2. We discussed having a normal projectile that would be able to kill some enemies and destroy some obstacles but after some discussion we came to the conclusion that the player might have a hard time navigating the environment and shoot and tackle obstacles with precision at the same time.
3. The last and final reason would be that we wanted simple and easy controls and adding a fire button that the player would constantly use would be distracting.
How I made the sonar beam: I made the sonar beam using timers and distance measuring. The sonar beam will get the position of the player and when the player is pressing the fire key a sonar beam will be created. The sonar beam will grow in size as it travels away from the player by increasing the scale of the sprite.
The second the wave starts traveling a clock starts ticking inside of the sonar beam. The beam will grow in size and be visible until the clock has reached 3 seconds. After 3 seconds it will be invisible and another timer will start. This timer is the cool down timer that makes it so that the player will not be able to shoot multiple waves in a short time frame. The sonar beam attack will be used as a power up and therefore it should not be something that you can use all the time.
When the sonar beam collidies with obstacles and enemies they will be destroyed.
This is one of the main features I made this week.
kimgrip 
Hey Kim!
It´s an well written post and i like how you step by step slowly explain what your projectile is and what the purpose of it is. Quite cleverly done of you to combine both one of your power-ups with your sole projectile and making it work in a smooth way. The reasons you present to why you remade it from a single projectile that is shoot from the player and can be fired multiply times in order to pick of single enemies at a time is a smart move. Since your game is fast paced with a lot of obstacles on the screen i can see that it would be quite hard for the player to shoot and at the same time avoid these obstacles.
A smart bomb is a great solution for this game since if you get stuck in a fast paced shooter you would want to get out of that situation as fast as you can and if you can wipe the entire screen or at least a big part of it is a perfect getaway. The use of times is a good way to restrict the player from using it constantly since that would be rather to powerful and i can see how i would have written this in a similar way. Nicely done.
//Feedback from David Eliasson, Group 10, 5SD033, GAME
GillaGilla