Shoot 'em up tutorials | Minilop Retroware

MPAGD Shoot 'em up Tutorials

Vertical Shmup - Part 1 - Introduction

A couple of people have asked for some tutorials on creating a Vertical Shoot-em up with MPAGD, something along the lines of Imagine's...

Vertical Shmup - Part 2 - Setting up the play area

I'm going to use Imagine's classic Arcadia as the basis for the game. I remember Arcadia being the first Spectrum game I saw, I was a...

Vertical Shmup - Part 3 - Setting up the Player Spaceship

Now that we have the play area set up, let's create the player spaceship and work on the code for controlling it. MENU: EDITOR >...

Vertical Shmup - Part 4 - The Player Weapon

So far we have an spaceship that the player can control, now we are going to give him a weapon he can fire. First, we need to consider...

Vertical Shmup - Part 5 - A framework for enemies

To start with, I'm going to create an Alien Ship sprite then write some code for its movement. In the first attack wave I want a stream...

Vertical Shmup - Part 6 - Killing Aliens

The basic game mechanics have started to take shape so now we'll tackle killing the aliens, first, we'll create a new Sprite for enemy...

Vertical Shmup - Part 7 - A Gameplay Decision

I started this series as a bit of nostalgic homage to Imagine's Arcadia, a game as a 12 year Old back in 1982 I loved. If you recall,...

Vertical Shmup - Part 8 - A more flexible approach to Aliens

So far, we have two waves of aliens, and they're pretty easy to defeat, but I can see a problem with the way we wrote it. In the game I...

Vertical Shmup - Part 9 - The Aliens Fight Back!

This is really starting to come together, we have an easily extensible framework for creating alien movement patterns, but they are a bit...

Vertical Shmup - Part 10 - A spot of housekeeping

Now that we've got most of the basics of the game working, let's take a break and tidy up the presentation of the game a bit. First let's...

Vertical Shmup - Part 11 - Improving the Alien Sprite

At the moment, our Alien Sprite only has one frame, and therefore is always pointing in the same direction no matter which way it is...

Vertical Shmup - Part 12 - Final tidying and improvements

If you recall, when we gave the Aliens the ability to fire missiles, one of tests that the code performs is to see if the Alien is...