Inheritance

Okay, it seems that I have successfully split up my sprites into their respective individual classes (34 of them at the moment*). It looks like the kinks have, so far, been minimal, so I'm going to work pretty hardcore on adding new sprites for the next couple of weeks. I had been seriously procrastinating on doing this (plus playing Fallout 3--it's very, very good) which is why it's taken so long. The content pipeline stuff was very easy--almost TOO easy, if you ask me--to switch over, and I'm hoping the lack of errors as of yet isn't some sort of elaborate plan on Microsoft's behalf to get my hopes up only to, at some point in the future, bring them down. As I've said, though, and this was the whole point of this exercise, this will make it incredibly easy to add new sprites without hassles. I just have to crank out some seriously amazing programmer art and I'll be good to go. I also need to port the project to XNA 3.0, see how that works out on the XBox, and look at what new stuff 3.0 offers.

My next major undertaking is going to have to be a fancy-schmancy Winforms level editor where you can do really crazy things like, you know, undo. This is some serious technology we're talking about here. I'm not going to start on that for at least a month or two, though, because it wouldn't make much sense to start that before the sprites are all at least somewhat finished. My master plan, at this point, is looking something like this:

1. Make a bunch of sprites.

2. Fancy level editor.

3. Engine enhancements (particles, better collisions, more sounds, et cetera).

Hopefully I'll make the time to work on it.


* The projectiles and powerups still use a shared class (Projectile.cs). This is because I need to convert objects between the different types fairly regularly in the course of a level. So, really, counting the five sprite types (so far) in the Projectile class, it's really 38 types. THE MORE YOU KNOW!