Power Up Prototype

I posted last about making power up particles well I’ve prototyped it. It works pretty much as how I wanted it, it needs tweaking slightly so that they don’t spawn to close in time to each other. It was quite complicated but as always looks simple on screen, I had to look at it in stages, retrieving the length if the song, collecting that in a variable, using that variable and getting 5 random numbers from the song which will be the actuation times for the power ups, then adding some time so they don’t overlap. I also had to remove 15 or so seconds from the variable song length. Thanks to this project I’ve now killed a good proportion of my favourite songs, when trying out my prototypes. I obviously pick songs I want to listen to but when you’ve listened to the beginning 30 times in an hour for hours, it wears thin. On a serious note prototyping songs is time consuming 3-4 mins per song, to check that out in full would suck up my time, so from early on in the project I’ve made 30 sec (exact) clips to prototype this and scaled down game elements to compensate, so make sure they work in full (song completion) as it were. I wanted the clips to be exact so I can manually time my code to check for consistency. It is a good job I did this, because it was streaming and loading some code fired off before other code had the required numbers. This has led me to decide to load the song before players play the level, there won’t be much of a delay for the player, there will just be a short loading screen before each song which I don’t think is unreasonable considering everything is happening at run time. There is also a slight delay in my particle system between music and visuals, a problem that seems to be common, so I’m hoping this will fix that too.