Defining enemies

Enemies are the type of data-driven thing in video games that are fun to think about, in terms of tooling and development.  They have lots of stats (health, size, damage they do, etc), and a lot of different behaviors attached (What function runs to update them? Does anything special happen when they take damage? What about when they deal damage? Or when they die?)

There are tons of solutions for how to handle this. But one of my soap-boxes is that game data should be defined in a textual format, and be easy to edit (either by editing the text format, or with an easy UI tool).

For Halcyon, I decided to use a YAML format for enemy definitions. YAML is a data definition language, similar to XML or JSON. If you read about it, there's all sorts of reasons people say you shouldn't use it. But it has one important thing going for it: it's really easy to read and write. Which is what I need for this game.

- name:        topgunner
  hp:          4
  width:       16
  height:      16
  dmg:         1
  on-collide:  NORMAL
  on-offscreen: KILL
  update:      enemyb_topgunnerUpdate
  animation:   anim_topgunner
  frames:      frames_topgunner
  init:        enemyb_topgunnerInit


- name:        topgunnerBullet
  hp:          4
  width:       4
  height:      4
  dmg:         1
  on-collide:  NORMAL
  on-offscreen: KILL
  on-shoot:    NONE
  update:      enemyb_8wayBulletUpdate
  animation:   anim_shooterBullet
  frames:      frames_shooterBullet
  flags:       BULLET

I define my enemies in a YAML format, specifying both their numeric stats, the name of some animation data to display them, as well as various routines and properties to define their behavior. My build script then converts this YAML at compile-time into an assembly language file that defines arrays of data to represent each enemy.  Symbol names (like enemyb_8wayBulletUpdate) get injected right into the generated assembly code, and the linker knows how to translate those into the addresses of the functions that they refer to.