My first home-made shmup

[ssfsx17]

It's a horizontal scroller (except that there's no backgrounds to be scrolled yet). It's coded in Java using Slick (http://slick.cokeandcode.com/index.php ) but that's proving to be a real pain in the butt when it comes to music. My main goals are to allow the player to buy upgrades for his ship in a way similar to Raptor and Tyrian, but have the main gameplay be difficult bullet-hell with a "Risk" system for multiplying your score. Risk increases by buzzing bullets and enemies.

I've gotten the basic gameplay and the Risk mechanic finished, and now I've been thinking about how to do the stage data. My current idea is to make each stage a text file that specifies all the objects in the stage (including backgrounds and other things), in the order that they appear, with a number on each line indicating the frame that the object appears on. Is this a good idea, or is there a better way?

Also, I was wondering how you all do the hitboxes and movement patterns for all the various types of objects that fly around in shmups. Right now, I've written a whole class for each type of object (each type of bullet, enemy, etc.) with the movement patterns and hitboxes basically hardcoded in. Is there a better way to do this?

[Ed Oscuro]

ZIP or... ?

[ssfsx17]

ZIP or... ?

I haven't even started thinking about how to build and distribute the thing. If you want to see the source code, though, we can discuss that...

[Ed Oscuro]

I'm not a code guy, but thanks for the thought :D