Today was entirely creating boss waves and patching bugs in the framework. In creating these waves I'm back to the balance challenge. I need to make the boss waves slightly harder than their previous level, but not so hard that it seems impossible. With this game, that's a fine line.
The Tank
Anyway this is "The Tank" - not an original name, I know, but it works.. I'll replace the center ship graphic with a more tanky thing later - it's just a place holder right now. This boss has a shield that takes punishment before the ship does. It fires "Seeker" missiles on a regular basis and also has a scatter shot cannon. Combine this with anything else on the screen and it can be challenging. 2 of them are really hard to defeat and 3 .. well I don't think it can be done - And so now I'm playing the balancing game. Tweaking shield values, firing rates, turn rates. All of those to make it challenging but not impossible.
Fixed the Spawn bug
I solved the spawn bug problem - there were a couple of conditions in the code that could trigger the enemy spawners to fire while in a boss battle and that's not what I wanted. So today I put code in to disable them before the battle starts and re-enable them after the battle is over.
Fixed an enemy bullet bug
Sentinels can fire bullets and so can this tank. I noticed when testing the tank that the Player shields didn't stop the bullet. This has probably been the case since I introduced Sentinels, but they show up so late in the game that when you die you figure you just got nailed with something. So in finding this it was an easy fix to make sure the collisions were behaving properly and now the player shields actually have value against the bullets :)
Started adding a health bar for Boss Battles
My wife was play testing last night and she didn't really have an indicator of how many times she needed to shoot boss wave ships. Because they can take more than one hit (often 30 - 50) she didn't feel like she was doing any damage to them. So today I started adding a health bar. I actually added it and in the process introduced a bug because of the way I designed it's update cycle. So now I'm redoing it - no worries though. It'll get there.
Tomorrow will be a short day so probably just trying to fix the health bar bug.