Thursday, October 20, 2016

Weekly Update #8

Well, first major slip up in my weekly updates. Oh well. Let's not beat us up over it.

Here some copy pasta from my commit notes:
- Made basic sector map with responsive nodes. Made finish line with curtains.
- Fixed explosion collision detection. Moved gm reference initializations to Start functions. Used SceneManager.activeSceneChanged to get singleton pattern working for gm. Created GameLord to resolve singleton issue. Placed watering holes with Guassian distributed water drops. Placed road blocks. Linked sector map with river level. Removed bird carrying item ability. Created dynamite item for destroying roadblocks. Made bullets die after 5s. Created DamAndWall prefab, scripts. Currently, nothing actually destroys gate. Moved finishLine to child of this. Created shop signs and spread them around.
- Made distance check (haven't tested it). Fixed Leech (test drag removal?). Changed claw controls. Created rock with gem spawns. Created Nuker, Freezer, Lake, Boss, Sunset, SpecialBullet, BrickWall, Nuke, Shade, Target Dot.
- Fixed up shop, added displays. Increasead spawn above rate. Rotated barrier angle. Fixed camera man, issue with bubbles not clamping to screen. Changed up powerbird. Issue with spawner not spawning dots for slice. Made harpoon Die calls used. Started working on Lance.
- Actiavting tetros and river dots piece by piece (and deactivating prev section). Started red shells item. Created sunset mechanic. Hatchling no longer inherits from item. Started lance pick up. Fixed rock gem spawning. Making hatchling survival easier.

So I have been working, just not updating. From testing with friends, there's plenty of bugs. I think the contant rate of spawning enemies isn't good enouggh alone. Want to create waves or surges of enemies or maybe triggers that then release a number of enemies. These sort of monster traps could be placed near watering holes or deposits (rock groupings that spawn the gems). Or near shops. Considering making finer gradation between shops, like repair shop, item shop,...maybe that's it. I will probably lower the rate of constantly spawning enemies, so that alone isn't difficult to deal with. Considering making physical traps for big bird, like big bird gets walled in and can't leave area until all enemies within are killed. Not sure.

I'm getting tempted to go down the new rogeulike designer pitfall path of wanting to include everything. Lately, wanting to make neutral enemies and AI v AI combat, as well as a sort of prayer system. The motivation for the prayer system is a solution to the game state of 0 greyhounds, but a funcional big bird. Maybe just deus ex machina and a stork flies by with baby greyhounds. idk.

I think I'm happy with my 3 current bosses, but need to test them. I want to have more on foot sections, but don't have great ideas and also there's issues with camera and some on foot and some flying players.

Wednesday, October 5, 2016

Weekly Update #7

Created an enemy spawn mechanic which picks a random entry in a list of enemies and spawns just above or to the side of the camera every 2 seconds. This was my basic way of pacing the game. Don't know why there's still fps dips into the 50s every once in a while. Sometimes, it's consistently in the 80s or 90s. Usually, high 60s. Don't have experience using tools to go about optimizing.

Made the tail station work properly with the cockpit station, including boosting and tweaking speed variables. Needs to be tested with two people playing now. Saturday night I'm having people over to play games, so it's sort of a deadline for me to get some more stuff done by then.