--- DevDiary ---

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- 2023/03/18 -

This week, I started porting enemy types from SD2020 to SDR.

There are seven different enemy types in Sunrise Doll. But the in-code number is nine, because even though the Worm is a single creature, its three directions are treated as three different enemies by the game. Out of these nine enemy classes, I've managed to port six: the Spider, the three Worms, the Bomb and the Squirrel.

Current population.

My original intent behind picking this enemy order was to mimic the order of enemy additions for the original SD2020. What I've found out is that it almost directly correlates with how code-intensive each enemy is: the Spider and the Worm do nothing but shoot pellets, the Bomb switches its states depending on the actions of the player, and the Squirrel has a rather complex map of the game field to determine where to fly next from its current position.

The enemies in action.

Side by side comparisons between how these enemies behave in SD2020 and SDR show that the transition has gone without any serious deviations. The logic, the visuals and the timing of each enemy so far has been comfortably preserved.

As a bonus, the Bomb now destroys all nearby enemies, which wasn't the case in SD2020 due to an oversight.

The remaining three enemies will be subsequently added. Right now the porting process has definitely gone into its second half, which means I have to deal with the second half of the original code, which is much less elegant than the first half. The typical difficulties of dealing with bad code were one of the factors behind abandoning SD2020, so now I have to make sure I do a better job at realizing the more delicate parts of the game.