Blog 3 – Week 8
The Old SpawnerThe reason why this blog post is called old spawner is because, since my original design of the spawner, it has been modified and changed to better suit our game and be simpler for the game designer to use. This script was a completely new topic that I have never worked on or attempted before so working on it was pretty difficult.With a bullet hell it is usually good to have waves spawn as to control the flow of enemies and it allows the designer to decide the size and difficulty of each wave. This is a wonderful concept and idea when thinking about it but since I have never programmed a wave it was a bit confusing when I first started out. The old spawner would randomly spawn an enemy between two y coordinates. It still did not work though the script, in theory, should have. After researching a bit and reading up on it, I actually needed a object in the game that I could attach the spawner to. This object was placed onto the scene way off the camera and it worked once this script was attached. I used a simple line of code that handled where the enemies would be spawning. When I first looked at the code below I tried figuring out how to work where the range was because at first it was just spawning in a straight line on the x-axis. The reason behind this was because the Random,Range(-spawning.y, spawning.y) literally means that the random range of spawning is between the negative y-value and positive y-value assigned by the game designer.
Once we played around with this spawner a couple days before the first play testing, we decided that the randomization was a bit much. In comparison to a normal bullet hell, the player can almost always know where the enemies will spawn. The old script, thought useful and efficient, was too sporadic and hard to control and design around. Taking this into account we decided to rework the spawning. Patrik modified the script to allow for the designer to choose if he wanted a random wave or a static wave with defined values. The defined values would be used every time that wave occurred in every instance of the scene without alteration.  Though this way of spawning proved to be much better for the overall creation of levels, it does become predictable after playing a couple of times. That being said, in my opinion just because it is predictable does not mean it is not difficult still.  **Note: The group has worked on modifying the spawner more so that the enemies are static and not continuously moving towards you.  |