MorbidWare, developer of The Textorcist, have posted a tech blog diving into the design of the bullet patterns seen in the game and their development with the GameMaker engine.
The tech blog walks through the process behind bullets, weapons, and patterns, focusing on the workflow that gave MorbidWare the flexibility to easily implement their solutions.
Here's an excerpt:
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As you can see here we have the base properties plus a number of properties for waving, generating other bullets, orbiting and so on. Usually, shmups are flat, but our game features a top-down view. Therefore we had to perform some visual trickery so that collisions would happen with bodies like in all shmups and elements would be sorted and placed with a projected shadow underneath.
Since bosses shoot from various fire points (hands, horns, etc…) and they vary in size, certain bullets generated by bigger or taller bosses would spawn at a certain height and should briefly reach the right height to hit the player character (which is between 0 and 12 pixels above the ground): that’s why we have also the altitude property and it can also be manipulated manually depending on the bullets needs.
All bullets in the Step Event adjust their altitude, update positions and check for collisions with walls.
The easiest bullet is the pistol bullet used by the tutorial boss. It’s just a straight bullet that reiterates the speed in every Step. Every bullet has its own code in the Step Event to update direction and speed and other properties as needed. The biggest part of the code is in the obj_bulletStep Event, so we can focus on the custom code for our children. Let’s see how the obj_bullet Step Event looks like:
Read the full blog post at https://www.yoyogames.com/blog/513/bullet-pattern-design-in-the-textorcist.
