readyornotstudios224

This week in development of Counter Sniper we finally gave the enemies the ability to actually fire on their target.

Up until now, we've mostly focused on getting them to spawn correctly, die when shot, hide when shot at, find their target, etc, and we finally reached the point where they were doing everything else you could want a sniper assassin to do correctly. So, we gave them some bullets and added an actual firing condition to their script, and we accidentally added a weird bug to the game.

All the enemies started killing themselves.

Instead of taking out their target like we had been carefully building them to do, they would spawn into the world, move out of cover, line up their shot, and with a bang, they would ragdoll and despawn.

This is obviously not ideal. Even if it might be more realistic, Halo would be no fun if all the grunts and jackals shot themselves at the first sight of the Master Chief and Counter Sniper wouldn't be good either if all our enemies were suicidal. Aside from that, the goal is to make a somewhat goofy first person shooter and not a psychological horror.

I spent more time than I would like to admit pouring through their scripting, desperately trying to figure out what innocuous lines we'd added in that would cause the snipers to shoot themselves. They weren't mistaking themselves for their target, we hadn't added a misery module or anything like that, there wasn't any bullet ricochet, our game track didn’t include Gloomy Sunday.

But what I forgot is that I'd ripped the firing mechanism from the player character and barely modified it to be worked by the NPC assassins. Every time they pulled the trigger, they were spawning a bullet in the chamber of the gun specifically tagged to kill them right next to their head, and just a little inside the hitbox for their head.

So, by trying to save a few minutes by reusing assets I lost a few days of productivity and created some extremely troubling and troubled enemies.

Even after all the suicides, Counter Sniper is still in Alpha, but if you want to hear more about our failures, please give us a follow on here for future articles and updates, join our Discord.gg to ask us questions or give suggestions, follow us on Twitter.com for quick updates, check our feed on Gamejolt.com, or feel free to reach out to us at readyornotstudios224@gmail.com for the hell of it.