In these past few weeks, we've made some great progress by adding in fancy effects and new enemy behaviors into the game. One of the enemies that went from boring to mildly interesting was the turrets!
Check out the boring turret below:
Pre-revamp, the turrets suffered from poor animations and lack of appropriate feedback. Even though they had legs, they hardly used them. In between shots the turrets would stand completely still and give no indication that they were in combat mode.
To address this, we adopted a rather radical change; we removed the turret's legs.
Paradoxically, making the turret stationary made them feel more complete. Since they had no legs, felt natural for the turrets to stay still in between shots. On top of that, we gave turrets a new behavior where they would retract if they were too close to the player.
The next step was putting turrets on walls:
Once the turrets were on the walls, there wasn't much else to do. The animations were more or less completed and the behavior itself was a great indicator of the turret's state.
The final step was adding in effects and other touches:
A couple of key additions were introduced in this step. First, we gave the projectiles a bullet trail and made them spin while the moved through the air. We also made it possible to deflect projectiles with attacks of your own.
All in all, I thought these changes played out rather well. Though the turrets move less, their movement is much more organic now and as a whole I think they feel more cohesive. Instead of being a ranged enemy that wanders aimlessly and shoots occasionally, the turrets are a part of the environment that restricts player movement without deterring close combat.
