Cartoon Wars Gunner Strategy

Posted on: http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?p=873296#post873296

My best was 982 yesterday, today I tried a variation on strategy and got 2992, fifth place for now
My strategy:

• Main Fighting Style
  -Use fast weapon to run away.
  -Move DIAGONALLY ZIGZAGGING through groups of enemies to avoid hits.
  -Get some distance, if no projectiles are about to hit switch to heavy weapon, stand still and fire.
  -When they get too close, switch and run.

[list]
Most Dangerous Enemies – Target First
Dragons
Magic Staff
Spinning Green Razor Bat
Archers
Never stay on the same height as these for very long. If you can hit them and stun them, get multiple hits on them before running again.
The Heavy Robots aren’t too much trouble – just run diagonally through them and you won’t get hit.

• Unequip Bow.
  Upgrade Pistols twice, for gold gain.
  Increase LC asap (soon as you get gold) until LV10.
  At level 10, start saving for the Assault Rifle.
  Walk away with Rocket Launcher to cool the Pistols (they have the gold bonus)
  Get at least 10k and Buy Assault Rifle.
  Unequip Rocket Launcher.
  Upgrade Assault Rifle for Gold Gain.
  Heal if you need to with Assault Rifle.
  Upgrade LC a few times.
  Upgrade Assault Rifle to LV5 for the power increase and MP gain.

  Alright, now you’ve got the Assault Rifle and good gold earning capacity, but it’s not enough. Get at least LC LV 20 – I did 23. At least 20, too much and you will have a lot of money but no firepower / health later on.

  Start increasing your MaxMP at least LV5 and Defense LV10. When you get full MP, increase MaxHP and heal.

  From here it becomes more fluid, the earlier is just to get you a good start.
  You want to get comfortable – full HP and MP, then save for the Robot Suit.
  If you’re concerned you’ll start getting hit more – it’s a different point in the game for everyone – Get Defense LV20. This can be before or after the Robot Suit depending how good you are at dodging. When the second set of Magic Wands come out, I upgrade Defense because they can be difficult to avoid.

  Upgrade Speed when the first spears come out. Get at least Speed LV10 – you’ll be fine with that for a long time.t

  Once you’ve got the Robot Suit, you’re in your prime. Focus on maxing your MP then raising MaxHP and healing. Get at least Defense LV25.

  You won’t need any more LC. Switch to your assault rifle when you get backed into a corner, run a circle & zig zag through the enemies, switch back to Robot Suit and gun them down! You will last a while doing this. Get MaxHP and Defense and HP Recover, Max MP, MP Recover to at least 30 each – upgrade your Suit when you can spare the cash.

  When you’re at least 30 in these stats, except for MaxMP / MP Recover (I didn’t focus as much on these until later) start saving up for the Ninja Stars (BEST WEAPON).

  Unequip Assault Rfile, Equip Ninja Stars, then focus on finishing your upgrades, taking breaks from that to improve your Ninja Stars – max upgrade is the best weapon imo.

  Just keep upgrading until all HP/MP/Defense stats are maxed, then boost Speed (boost earlier if you think you need the help in dodging). By this point I was full HP all the time and over 50% MP constantly. I really think Defense is better than HP Recover to upgrade, because it helps you even when you’re full HP from healing.

  Had tons of money at this point – bought and upgraded a flamethrower a few levels just to try it, but unequipped it. Focus on health / defense / MP recovery – with LV 23 the money will come in quick

  That’s it! I scored 5′th place with 2992 kills today. Hope to see you guys and girls kick me out of the top 5.

[list]
DONT BOTHER UPGRADING
Cooldown: You won’t need it until after all of your other stats are maxed.
Power: I never noticed a big difference in damage – upgrade this after everything else is maxed. I waited until after I had the Ninja Stars – did fine without it until then.
Skill: More useful than Cooldown, but wait until you’re LV40 in the other stats. Upgrade this before Cooldown.

Thanks for reading!
Please check out my first iPhone/iPod game (arcade physics):
http://forums.toucharcade.com/showthread.php?t=42394

Give CWG a good rating!

Rethinking the Code of Enlightenment Vision

The first version of Enlightenment Vision was made over a year ago. It took so long to finish because I was jumping from project to project learning new aspects of Objective-C and experimenting with other game ideas. Since then I’ve improved tremendously and have been thinking about how I would code EV today.
When I started EV, I didn’t know how to use arrays, so I turned that limitation into a challenge for innovation by deciding that each game element would have a unique relationship to the other. I ended up adding in the blue corners for a scoring section, which are the only copied objects. Now, instead of writing the Life, Death, Obstacle and Enlightenment movement code separately, I would create a class of objects with properties that determine how they behave.

One property would be “collides with”. Could do multiple “collides with” properties for each object “type” (I think this is OK if you only have a few), or a string / array with a series of numbers referencing each object. Another property would define the “effect” for each kind of collision. Effects would include “strike”, “bounce”, “damage”, “kill”. Strike would function as Life and the Obstacles do now, bounce would have both objects affected by the momentum.

Another property would be “movement type” (along with the various acceleration / turning / top-speed values that Life and Death currently use). In Enlightenment Vision, Life pursues Understanding with a separate X and Y velocity while Death follows a smoother curve. There would be four properties for pursuit: one for type, one for current object, one for rules of starting pursuit and a variable to be used when determining starting pursuit (eg. modifying the % pursuit begins, or a distance the two objects must be closer than). Not necessary for Enlightenment Vision, but essential for making the system reusable. In a different game, an object could be defined as pursuing “type 1″, with a null current target, pursuit type “1″ (which would find the closest object of that kind and pursue). So when this object ticks (how often an object ticks could be another property) it will scan the game object array for “type 1″s. If it finds any, it will call checkPursuit:(1) to see if it should begin pursuit using the “begin pursuit” property of value 1, which calls for “begin pursuit immediately”. The object would set its target, and then its movement type and variables would determine how it follows.

Properties for determining the end of a pursuit (target is too far, target is dead, target has changed targets) would be useful, as would properties to define additional movement behavior like dodging incoming attackers, or weighing diverting pursuit to avoid proximity to a corner or collect a power-up, or evade if the target has recently used a weapon, or speed up if the target has recently used a technique that will slow them down / cause them to be defenseless.

A createObject function would call for an integer to determine what type, and possibly a CGPoint for location, or an integer for use in a spawningRules lookup by the createObject function, which would received the integer for what type of object, as well.

I have done something similar when creating kinds of ships in SHMUP engines, but just for determining varying stats when most of the behavior is the same. This design allows for differing behavior, dynamically generated so you can change a few parameters of an object type instead of the inefficient “change how type 1 behaves in the move function, change how type 2 behaves in the fire function”, properties for each type are assigned, so you can have more properties than you need and just switch them out during development.

Have a few projects in sight at the moment, I expect I’ll make something of this though.

First Contract Application Finished

Created a registration app for ContentActive’s site http://contentmobi.com . They provide a mobile-phone formatted website with lots of GUI customization available on their site management tool for adding RSS feeds, images, other URLs, sub-pages, etc. There’s still some more iPhone app work to do, will announce when the application is out on iTunes.

Enlightenment Vision live!

http://linktoapp.com/enlightenment_vision

An innovative, original arcade game, Enlightenment Vision places you in control of the White Dot of Understanding.

Life chases Understanding and you guide Life into colliding with the Obstacles, angling them to the corner of the Void.

Obstacles bounce if the strike an edge, you score more points the less they bounce.

After a few shots, the Obstacles speed up and Death appears, chasing after Life!

Protect Life and destroy 100 Obstacles to win!

Features:
-Fun and unique gameplay!
-3 difficulty levels for all players.
-Tutorial and Practice modes.
-Pauses when you let go of the screen.
-Auto-saves.
-3 beautiful soundtrack pieces.
-OpenFeint integration with Leaderboards and 11 Achievements to earn.