Chapter 6. Designing a fixed shooter
You are a powerful wizard with one annoying enemy: ghosts. The only way to destroy the ghosts is to blast them with magic using your wand. One night, you decide to rid the world of these pesky apparitions. You go out in an open field and wait for the ghosts to descend. Moments later, they’re swooping down on you. As the ghosts fall from the sky to attack, you cast a spell with your wand and fire the red sparks seen in figure 6.1, hitting the ghosts with magic before they reach the ground.
Figure 6.1. A game of Wizards vs. Ghosts means making an open field and night sky backdrop, the wizard, a ghost, red sparks, and a barrier line (not shown in image).
Wizards vs. Ghosts is a fixed shooter like Intellivision’s Astrosmash. In Astrosmash, you’re a space cannon with blasters, and you need to shoot down falling asteroids before they hit the ground. In Wizards vs. Ghosts, you’re a wizard, shooting down ghosts with sparks from your wand. The wizard moves left and right across the grass. The ghosts fall from the sky. The goal is to avoid the ghosts. Scoring moves in two directions, removing points if you miss a ghost and giving you points if you hit a ghost.
Once again, as you make the sprites for the game, you’ll learn some key art concepts, such as proportion and scale.
In this chapter, you will learn