New game: Space Invaders

It’s been a while since I published RetroRacer, but a lot of new things happened in Steroids too! So many things that I backported the old games to the new engine; I’ll be testing them each time to see if I’m introducing any breaking changes. But! back to Space Invaders.

(brave ship fighting off alien hordes)

The game is now available at https://github.com/tadzik/steroids. Below I’ll outline some of the new features in the engine itself.

Animations

It is now possible to load animations from spritesheets (example here), and tell Steroids to animate them over time.

self.load_spritesheet(‘invader’, ‘assets/invader.png’, 72, 32, 7);

my $invader = self.add_sprite(‘invader’, $x, $y);

self.add_animation($invader, Any, 200, True);

In order: load a spritesheet of seven 72×32 images, put it on screen an animate all its frames (Any), changing a frame every 200 miliseconds, and play it in a loop (True). The ships will rotate and look nice :)

Gamepad support

method update($dt) {
    my $pad = self.gamepads[0];
    my $analog = $pad.analog_percentage($pad.analog_left_x);

    if self.is_pressed(“Left”) or $pad.dpad_position(“Left”) {
        $!player.x -= 15;
    } elsif self.is_pressed(“Right”) or $pad.dpad_position(“Right”) {
        $!player.x += 15;
    } elsif $analog.abs > 0.1 {
        $!player.x += Int(15 * $analog);
    }

    …

}

    

New steroids features gamepad support! At this point the only supported one is the Xbox controller (I accidentally used the old SDL joystick API instead of a new, shiny gamecontroller API), so it’s all a little bit experimental. But, as you can see, it works pretty well and is quite useful indeed!

Game states

class Main is Steroids::State {

    …

}

 

class Menu is Steroids::State {

    …

}

 

given Steroids::Game.new {
    .add_state(‘menu’, { Menu.new });
    .add_state(‘main’, { Main.new });
    .change_state(‘menu’);
    .start;
}

What’s going on here? We have to separate game states (one for the menu and one for the actual game), and we can switch between them at any point using the change_state() method. For example, somewhere in Menu’s code:

method keypressed($k) {
    if $k eq ‘S’ {
        self.reset_state(‘main’);
        self.change_state(‘main’);
    }

    …

}

The states themselves are passed in as code references for the sake of the reset_state() method shown above. You can think of them as factories. The reset above is necessary, so each time you start a new game, it actually starts anew instead of continuing the old one (which is probably either lost or won by that time).

I probably forgot about something, so if anything is unclear just write it in the comment section. Go try out Space Invaders, and don’t forget about the soundtrack!

I’ll be talking about Steroids next weekend at this year’s Polish Perl Workshop; make sure to stop to find out about the latest developments and future plans.