Retronoid Update XVIIII

Hello folks.

Not done too much this week, been laid up for most of it with a nasty stomach bug, and what little time I had left was spent finishing the prep work in the spare bedroom ready for the plastering next week.

That said, some stuff got done (mostly just after last weeks update), a lot of which was polish:

Powerups :

• Level Skip is now in and working correctly - just got to add some particle effects to it. Basically the bat gets "rocketed" off the top of the screen as the level transition happens, and descends back in before play restarts on the next level.
• Added some messages to let the player know when the Destroyer, LaserBall, Graviton Beam and Forcefield are depleted.
• Completely re-wrote the powerup spawn routine - each block now has a drop chance, and when its destroyed this is added to the drop chance running total. If that hits 100, or if the random check produces a number less than the current dropchance, it will spawn a powerup.
• Powerups are now split into 4 categories, common, uncommon, rare and very rare, and spawn accordingly.
• Removed any powerups that were dropping down the screen when a level ends.

Still some very minor tweaks to do to stop rares popping up too often, and to avoid duplicates immediately after one another, but that should be pretty simple.

Other:

• Added a coloured "flash" to the blocks when they are hit, and trigger this before they're destroyed.
• Changed the level switch trigger so that it occurs when the last block has actually finished its animation on destruction.

Big Change:
After a fair bit of playtesting I've decided that the levels are too large horizontally, so I'm going to remove two columns from each level and make them a bit narrower. I threw in a test level at the relevant width, and that played much better.

 This will mean a little bit of a re-write of some code, but most of it is already built to accommodate such a change. Worst will be going through each level already coded in and changing those. Probably no more than an evenings work though.

And that's about it for this time, thanks for reading.