Day 9: Operation Amoebacane

Phew! Today was quite the busy day in terms of work. Finally connected to Perforce for source control on projects and started our first RPP group; the current project has a placeholder name called "Amoebacane" and features quite a bit from my finished work in Lizard Rain.

For finishing up Lizard Rain, I used the SharedObject class in AS3 and built a quick high score and high timer score section for gameplay feedback, and learned how garbage collection works in AS3. When one sets an object to null, that effectively deletes the object and removes all children beneath it. However, when removing that child from the screen, there is a separate visual hierarchy that still leaves that leftover image while nullified. A proper call to removeChild helped save a lot of rendering time, as the leftover images of the menu, game over, and play screens were not removed and made subsequent playthroughs intensely slower. I also did a quick change on the enemy visuals, adding a random color tint for variety. And that marks the end of that project:

What next? Operation Amoebacane, of course. Luckily I adopted the game framework and soundManager successfully from Lizard Rain, and managed to externalize all assets, including buttons. What next? I know the playScreen needs a background.