This month's shooter template episode boosts the enemies' IQ quite a bit, making them use much smoother paths, and introduces elevators and horizontally moving platforms. Copy the new \shootertemplate folder inside your Gamestudio installation folder, and then run the main.c script; you will see that the level contains 3 different platforms that are placed near the house.
The 1st one is an elevator that helps the player reach the roof easily; the other two platforms move horizontally, along the x and y axis. As you might know, I like to keep my code as simple as possible, so I have decided to create separate actions for the elevators and for the horizontally moving platforms.
Let's take a look at the things that can be customized for the elevator:
- "Elevator_height" tells the elevator at which height (in quants) to stop; set this value as needed.
- "Elevator speed" sets the vertical speed for our elevator.
- "Elevator_wait" gives the waiting time after reaching the destination. With the current value of 4 seconds, the elevator will move until it reaches the destination point, and then it will wait for 4 seconds before returning to its initial position.
The picture below shows the values that can be set for the horizontally moving platforms.
- "Platform_offset" will give the horizontal distance that must be covered by the platform.
- "Platform_speed" sets the movement speed.
- "Platform_wait" tells the platform the number of seconds that it must wait before returning to its initial position.
- "X_axis" tells the platform to move along the x axis (if X_axis is set to 1) or along the y axis (if X_axis is set to 0). The level comes with a platform that moves along the x axis, as well as with a platform that moves along the y axis.
That's all for this month! Next month we are going to do some cleanup, optimizations, and then we'll hopefully wrap up this template!