Incremental updates ahoy!

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Okay, so I've been really really busy in the real world in the past several weeks. Unfortunately, I've had little time to work on Extinctathon. I have done some stuff in the past week, though, so here's what I'm working on:

• The levels now have barriers that keep the walking enemies (i.e. everything but the bees at this point in time) bound to a particular region, primarily keeping them from walking off the edges and commiting enemy suicide. These are inserted manually in the level editor, an idea that seemed retarded (in that there must be a smarter way of doing it) until I saw a similar mechanism in a commercial 2D level editor.
• The barriers, along with the previously mentioned checkpoints (see previous post) now turn invisible outside of the level editor. I'm listing this as an additional feature to make it look like I did more work this week so I can feel better about myself.
  
• The major bounding box issues have been fixed, but a smaller problem still remains. Projectiles, as you may recall, are reformed from existing projectile objects which avoids using new (since the XBox 360 is racist against news). The problem was that the bounding box was being semi-manually set after the creation of the object in a spectacularly stupid way, so when the bounding box for the object changed (like when a fireball turns into a bible, which is bigger), it wasn't getting updated in the code. At first I tried to work around this by referencing the data from the sprite sheet, which does have the bounding box information for every sprite in the game, but that was REALLY slow. At the moment, it's copying the box from the sprite sheet at object creation/reformation time, which is doable (since the sprite sheet should never be changed, this should be okay).
• And, finally, aside from the necessary addition of an end, which I'll get back to in the next section of this post, I'm done with the basic construction of the first level of the game. I'm happy with it, and I'm sure I'll tweak it, but I want to have something roughly set in stone so I can look beyond it on to other things.

What's next? A lot.

• The biggest thing--and I mentioned this in my last post as well--is level transitioning. When the player crosses the final checkpoint of the level, a little animation needs to happen, perhaps a summary or a ghetto cutscene, and then we need to move on to the next level. This is going to be tricky, and I am going to have it done by this time next week. It will be done. Seriously. I have to do it. So that's what I'll do.
• I need a couple of tweaks to the powerup system, including the ability to set what type of powerups come out of the box inside the level editor. At the moment I'm just procedurally saying "the box has been hit, pop out a fireball!". Along these lines I need to make the brick blocks breakable and give them similar behaviors to the questionmark blocks.
• A whole bunch more, which I'll maybe get in to in a bit.

As always (at least usually), here's the video:
Extinctathon: Barriers, checkpoints, and bug fixes (720p 10.1mb download, recommended)
The same video (YouTube)