SQUARIUS

[zeroone]

I finally finished it. Very good.

Nice.  Thanks for playing.

However, I was killed right as I killed the last boss, but still got credit for beating the level and thus the game. Not sure if this is the way you want it to be.

When you destroy the final boss, you actually become invulnerable, game input is disabled and your ship is no longer painted to the screen.  But, there may still be some green animated balls floating around you.  So, you disappear, but you're not dead    In short, you won!  Good job!

[EnderGT]

When you destroy the final boss, you actually become invulnerable, game input is disabled and your ship is no longer painted to the screen.  But, there may still be some green animated balls floating around you.  So, you disappear, but you're not dead    In short, you won!  Good job!

Cool. I thought I'd been killed because right at that moment my boss walked in and I had to minimize the game )

I'll be checking out your source code to see if I can't learn a few things. I've never written a side-scroller type game, so most of all I'm interested in how you store the levels and spawn information.

Again, great job, and good luck in the judging.

[zeroone]

I thought I'd been killed because right at that moment my boss walked in and I had to minimize the game

That's hilarious 

I'm interested in how you store the levels and spawn information.

Normally the levels in side-scrollers are represented with grid maps.  I used such maps in my Pitfall entry.  But, for Squarius I took a much simplier approach.  There are 8 pieces that can be put together in different sequences to form a level.  Pieces include a wave attack, a triplet attack, a wall with a hole in it, the explosive barrier, the shrinkers, the cave, a boss, etc.  Each piece is affected by the level number (e.g. bosses become more difficult) and a random number generator (e.g. the hole in the wall will appear at different positions). 

Essentially, when the stage begins, a clock is started.  The sequence for each stage looks something like: at time T1, manifest wave attack, at time T2, manifest triplet attack, etc.  Originally, this was encoded with 2 arrays of integers.  But, to save bytes, it was ultimately encoded more compactly.