Progress This Week

Some notes about what I worked on over the last week:

I spent some time this week attempting to implement some type of enemy flight pattern logic into the game. I did a lot of research and ended up finding some sample code showing how to implement a "sine wave" pattern. The sample was not specific to a game, but I was able to adapt some of the logic to implement a basic flight pattern, which I put into the code for Level 3. I'm not completely happy with the code. It's not exactly the look I was looking for and plus I was hoping to find something more readily adaptable to other patterns. I hope to find some other ways to improve this aspect of the game going forward. This type of logic seems like an important aspect of game development, so I hope to learn more about how it's done effectively.

Another thing I worked on this week was modularization of the section of the display that shows the player's score. This was mostly done as a proof of concept. I wanted to get the hang of implementing external module calls in Corona. I did some research and found some helpful tutorials on the topic in the Corona documentation. I created the 'displayfunctions.lua' module. This is a very basic module so far, which contains only a few functions so far, but could potentially be a place to put additional logic in order to keep things more logically organized.

On a separate but related topic, I have noticed that some aspects of Corona "best practices" seem to be in a state of flux. For example, I found this 7/6/11 entry on the Corona site on how to implement external modules: http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2011/07/06/using-external-modules-in-corona/.  I later found this 9/5/11 entry on the Corona site: http://www.coronalabs.com/blog/2011/09/05/a-better-approach-to-external-modules/. The latter entry, written by the same author just 2 months after the former, explains a "better" way to implement external modules compared with corrections to the method described earlier. A comment posted on the later entry notes that a technique described in the earlier entry had been deprecated by the creators of lua.