In this picture, you can see who is the first crook Sol Hunt will face. Remember him? Also, you can see several new things. For one, Sol is holding her superbomb in the non-gun hand (in this case, it's apparently a giant bowling ball. I just made a random shape to test it, but really, that could easily be one of the bombs. Not sure what it would do!). For another, on her back is a Device. Devices are a passive bonus of some kind, whether it's extra armor, radar tracking, boost to your weapons, or something far more interesting like a radioactive pulse that hurts all enemies a little bit every second. And the last new and interesting thing is that the gun arm, flame, shells and bullets are all now antialiased. They look way better! That was a nice feature in the new version of Flixel I am now using, but I'll probably end up having to turn it off as the game fills up with monsters and bullets everywhere. It slows things down.
So yeah, that new Flixel version. They just released a major update for it yesterday, and I decided to switch to it when I read about the things it offered (mainly faster collision checking - I knew I would have tons of bullets in this game, and that could prove very important). It's
way better than the old version! For one, it's a lot faster. I no longer experience slowdown in debug mode with all my bullets and shells flying. It's also got a lot of great features and it makes a lot more sense to me too. I really like coding with it. On the downside, I'm having some serious problems. For one, I had to take that screenshot with Daibaka facing right, because the backpack and bomb both refuse to flip when you face left. I have no idea why, and I can't find anything that makes them different from the other parts which do flip. The other major problem is that I can't for the life of me get Daibaka to collide with walls anymore. The bullets have no problem hitting walls, but she just zips right through them.
These are really frustrating issues because I have the complete source to Flixel, I can dig right in there and I do. I put trace() statements to see what's going on, I check everything, and it all seems to be working just fine... it just doesn't! Total mysteries.
I'm not blaming the fact that the game will not even be hardly started on February 14th on these issues, though. It is nowhere near far enough long to get finished either way, and I accept that. I have been slow on it. But I am having fun, I am enjoying the game concept, and I feel like I'm learning a ton about making flash games.
