- Add support for 3 or 4 players
- Add support for turning your ship to allow 360-degree shooting
- Force bullets to curve toward the middle of the black hole to discourage "trapping"
Adding support for more players is incredibly simple. I need to simply make two more player objects, and add in the built-in logic for collisions that the other players already contain. I'll also need to make two more "rooms" - Gamemaker's levels, one for three players and one for four. Then on the main startup room I'll need to add some logic for allowing players to choose if they want a 2, 3, or 4-player game. It's as simple as the user pressing the corresponding number key. Controller support for the two additional players is easy as well. When each player is created, it is assigned a 'pad_num' variable. Player 1 is 0, player 2 is 1, and so on. Players 3 and 4 will just need to be assigned that variable.
The logic for turning the ship is slightly more complicated. I already have the logic written for turning with the right analog stick, but the sticks are too loose for it to work correctly. I'll have to look into using the bumper buttons, and having each press turn the ship 90 degrees instead of having true free movement. I'll have to look into this more.
The third change is making bullets have a weight and angle to them. This will be achieve by using the built-in gravity and gravity_direction functions in GameMaker. I'll add the gravity to the bullets to make them gravitate towards the middle of the screen.