Enemy waves

I' m creating a 2d vertical space shooter. The project is on a halt because of the large amount of work I had the last 6 months. Now that I finish with this stuff, I wanna continue my project. But I have a big problem. I can't find a way to manage multiple enemy waves. I can't really find which behaviour to apply on the enemies... I tried bullet behaviour with little success. Also I can't find a satisfactory way to place the enemies on the screen when it's their time to appear. Please note that I haven't watched contruct's updates for a long time... Has a path movement behaviour been added ? It would make my life easier. Any help would be appreciated !

Getting enemies to spawn in waves could be done with the Timeline object. You could define when they appear, where they spawn, different patterns, etc. There are a few examples floating around the forum that show how it's used (mainly for dialogue, but it can be used for other things as well).

As for the movement of the enemies, no there's no path movement yet (though I have heard rumors), but with clever mix of math and behaviors you should be able to make some fairly dynamic enemies pretty easily.

Check my tower defense demo for an idea how to do waves:

Basically, you need to do the following:

• define a condition for next wave to spawn (all enemies defeated - no enemy objects on screen, time expired etc.)
• condition that checks whether the spawning is still active (for multiple enemies) - if the spawn is not instantaneous, that is
• create your wave as you want it (in your case, you could use X offset from the midpoint to spawn them along the edge)
• finalize the spawn process (reset the conditions, add to the number 'Wave' or whatever)

In my case, I decided each 10th wave to be the boss wave, all others are spawned in increments, one after other, from the same spot.

Hope this helps you.

Heh we should make a list of 'common game design questions' which we can provide simple 'event-wise methods' of achieving stuff in the simplest way possible...enemy 'waves' and spawning positions in general is a good topic to add!

'common game design questions' should go right on the wiki, I know I'd be all over that!

Heh we should make a list of 'common game design questions' which we can provide simple 'event-wise methods' of achieving stuff in the simplest way possible...enemy 'waves' and spawning positions in general is a good topic to add!

Absolutely. That'd make it a lot easier to learn the whole deal. The interesting thing about games is that, as an artform, everyone copies from one another anyway, trying to better what the other studio did wrong. So a lot of the stuff that people would come up with will be very similar and it doesn't make sense if 10.000 people all need to solve the same problem 10.000 times.

Video Tuts on this would be neat, so people could learn in an even quicker fashion. There are services like youtube and vimeo now, so why not making full use of em?

I'm all for videos if they are kept short and sweet. I've seen some terrible ones for photoshop where people are flailing their mouse about miss clicking and theres long awkward silences and 'no wait...scrap that...i mean'

Video tuts generally suck, cant read anything on screen, cant go back to a certain spot easily, etc.

Now if you want to use use something like this:

http://debugmode.com/wink/

I don't see a problem.

Newt I love you! I've been looking for software like this for ages! I was even thinking of having a go at making something like that! But its already been done and looks pretty good from the flash video. I'll have a look at it when I get home

Yeah its a decent set up, just need to find a host for the .swf's