I'm working on a college project at the minute, and as stated above we're making an r-type clone.

I've been looking at using an array of strings to populate the levels. The array contains 60 strings, filling the Y axis, each element in the array represents a y co-ordinate += 10. I use "0" to represent empty space, "1" to represent a block of terrain.

Then I use a for loop and charAt() method to create a new array representing each column along the X axis, and populate the screen this way.

I thought I was being clever by making a "block" class that checked to see if it was connected to any other blocks and adjust it's image accordingly to make the terrain look as if it's a single block/shape. However, this is now slowing down the game to a crawl as there are so many objects in it.

I've tried to add the columns as the game is scrolling and removing them once they leave the screen, but I end up with gaps in the terrain.

How are levels in these types of game normally implemented? Would I be better creating a few big objects to make the terrain and build the whole level from start to finish?

Is there some method I've completely missed?

Here is a screen shot of how it looks at the minute, each block is 22 x 10 pixels.