Non-update update

My progress this week has been lacking. I've worked my way through a few more menus and working on unlocking/upgrading, which is easy but terribly tedious. I started trying to revamp my game physics since I wasn't very happy with the speed of gameplay, plus getting caught up on blocks and whatnot. The idea was to use a constant force applied to the player to "push" them through the level at a constant rate of speed, despite objects. The biggest difference would be that if the player was pushed through a block or a bad guy without him destroying it first, it would cause the player damage, which, as it turns out, was incredible frustrating, and became increasingly more-so when dealing with jumping or mid-air acrobatics. So I opted out of that style and stuck with the old gameplay, but decided to add ramps. They slow the player down ever so slightly, but allow the player to elevate over obstacles without having to jump every half-second. Which leads me to ideas of special blocks that will cause the player to speed up (like a forward boost) or a slow down (like a sticky pit) when they move on/over them. Still a very early idea, and  I'm not quite sure how to make it not look strange, we'll see. On a side not, I took a look at my coding for that side-scroller: Primitives, that I was working on months back, and wow, I was almost frightened by how bad it was. I made some cursory changes just to make gameplay a little smoother, which turned out nice, but there are so many other processes going on simultaneously that chew up system resources and they seem to bog the game down a bit, especially with camera movement. I'll have to come back to that one later on when I'm done with this current project. So after I made the changes I wanted, I decided it would be a good idea to take a look at the FPS I started work on so long ago, my first real project. It was like trying to read hieroglyphics. The coding is sooooooo bad! I have no idea what I was thinking with it all. I guess I never really understood the term "Hack" in reference to coding before now, but it's like every script was pure hack, just to make the game run. I have so many improved methods now compared to then that it almost hurts looking at it. Which brings me to my last point: I told myself back then that I would never re-write the code for that game because I had put so much time and effort into it, but now I know I will. I may keep certain aspects, but almost every script has serious flaws. That's all for now. More to come later.

Menu Update

     Just returned from a short little underway, (although it felt more like a month than two weeks) and I had a little time to spend on my game, polishing up a few glitches, and most importantly adding menus. The introduction is only a formality, it's not useful at all, clicking next through the three windows then finish on the last one will initialize a character on your computer. (it's a first-run script that will explain how the game works and what you should do, as well as some basic help, but right now I'm more concerned with getting everything functional.) once created, the help dialogue will never re-appear, unless you press "P" at which point you should close out of the game and restart, P deletes all stored data dealing with this game.
     Ok, that being said, Here is what works: A simple list of actions that can be chosen if, from the main menu, you click on "Character", then click on either "Powers" or "Gadgets". for the time being, all powers are availible for use, in the release game, they will have to be unlocked, and then upgrades will be availible for purchase as well, none of those work at this time. so select the powers you want, based off the action button you would press (note that only specific actions can be assigned to specific keypresses/swipes. left tap is the "Jump" menu, while right tap is the "Attack" menu.) For the sake of porting to computer as apposed to android, use the wasd keys for swipe-direction, spacebar for left tap, and mouse left click for right tap. Makes sense right? Space-bar jumps, left click attacks...
     So once you've selected what powers you want, you'll notice the only other working button on the main "Character" page is the "Gadget" button, with one gadget availible. Moving on, lets start actually playing this game, go to "Level Select" from the main menu, click 1, because thats the only one that actually works, and it will load up with a pause menu up, click either "Play!" or hit the esc key, use the keys and play through the level, destroy thin blocks and bad guys to get collect coins, the game is only 100m long for now, but you can hit the esc key again to pause the game(this will be equivalent to hitting the back button on android phones) select restart, end level, or character, here you can modify the characters powers, in game, but whetever you select here will not be saved, and will revert to your original selection once you've ended the level and return to the main menu. The in-game character button will only be for a visual reference and stats, and right now is only for debugging.
     Right now the coins are saved to your computer when you end a level, thats the only time they are, I'll add a script that stores them any time the game window is closed, sometime later maybe. Got a lot more to work on, so let me know how I'm doing, Feedback drives me forward!

https://www.dropbox.com/s/wqv3ljp24rkvu5b/AndSS%200.04.zip