Second post, fish game
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Hi again. My name is Ludvig and I am the lead designer in team shadhavar. This time I will be talking about the powerups in our game, which in our case happen to be different types of weapons. I both coded and designed the weapon powerups for the game. In an earlier week of the project I had asked the artists for some different types of weapons for the player. I also told them that it was important that the weapons were of noticeably different of types, such as a rocket launcher and a machine gun. The reason why I wanted to have very distinct weapon types was so that we could easily communicate to the player the uniqueness of each weapon in comparison with the other weapons. For me it was very important to make weapons function and act differently in addition to having differences in stats. Having weapons act differently when fired is a very simple way to bring a lot of flavor to a weapon and it is instantly noticeable for the player without having to look at stats such as damage or magazine size.
I initially created the code for three types of weapons one fully automatic firing, one semi automatic and one chargeable firing. I began with creating the fully automatic code first and that became the basis for all the other weapons. In total I created four gun types: an assault rifle type, a pistol type, an exploding bazooka type and after some suggestions a chargeable slingshot type. The exploding type gun was just a semi automatic type with a difference in projectile, the difference being that the projectile would trigger an explosion on impact with anything. However the most interesting gun type to develop was the chargeable slingshot type, it was a real challenge. I decided that in order to have a weapon charge, it needed to start a timer when the shoot button was held down. The timer for the charge would help to determine which one of three cases where true, was the gun fired at low charge, mid charge or fully charged. The charge of the shot would in turn decide the properties of the projectile. The issues I encountered were related to the gun shooting when the player let go of the shoot button. I determined that the issues were most likely caused by the base system which I had created for handling the players guns. Not wanting to circumvent an established system out of the worry for the potential issues that could cause, I still decided to try and integrate the gun type into the system. I did sort of solve the issues with the slingshot gun type, however it is inconsistent in the way that it fires, which means that it might have to be cut later on down the line unless the inconsistency is solved. Usually when I create a system that decides what type of equipment or power ups are available to the player, I put it in it’s own separate object or part of a larger “Game Master Script” object and then refer to the player object. This time however I put the system for handling powerups in the player, I did this because I had planned to try implementing some sort of local multiplayer. I thought that it would be effective to have all the code that could affect a player in one script because that would allow me to recycle the original player script for the second player. I would however not recommend mixing the code for the power ups or anything similar in with the players code if you are working on a larger project, it was probably only appropriate here because the scope for the game was pretty small to begin with. Thanks for reading and I hope this provided some useful insight.  |
