As the astute gamers among you may have noticed, the shooting kinda sucks. You can shoot as fast as you can click and never reload. And there’s one more thing. There’s no juiciness to the shooting. It’s just some balls that go flying. Nothing special. No effects, particles, or sound. Granted, I don’t plan on making or implementing the sounds just yet but it would do me good to keep its future implementation into consideration.
First thing's first, I limited the amount of ammo the gun will hold at a time and a reservoir of ammo I can easily change from infinite to a set amount. In the future I might change the system so the player can use ammo from different guns interchangeably, but my current design for this game doesn’t include different types of pistols or rifles that would use the same ammo. I’m keeping it simple unless needed. As most programmers should know and live by, KISS.
To test different gun systems, I created a scene with a bunch of stationary guns in a line. To fire them off, I created a simple script to just fire off each gun as I’d like. Very little coding was needed so that’s good for my workload. I shouldn’t be touching or re-using this code at anypoint yet it speeds up how I test gun effects. I think it was a good use of my time. This scene is available in the newest prototype.
Speaking of the prototype, I’ve also been working on updating the menu system. As everyone who has played the previous prototypes noticed, THERE IS NO MENU. There is just a fade to black and quit button when you’re ready to leave. This isn’t really a problem but it does limit what I can show off to a single scene that the player can leave. There isn’t even a pause menu or the ability to die and restart (but I’m holding off on the death bit). So from this point on, there will be a basic menu to quit the game or change the scene.
One last thing, the layout of the overworld is basically finished. Almost all the sprites need to be redone as well as the scene itself since it’s done in 1.5 scale. I just scaled up the sprites to fit my needs when I started the rough layout. I decided to keep it like that till I got a good idea of what sprites I’ll need and their placement. There’s still more I could do like details but for now, I’ll wait till I have the scene setup at a proper scale with more final graphics before I add details like that. You can explore the layout from a bird's eye view in the current build.
There’s not much new content this month, but it does help me to keep my momentum by tackling something even if it's small. All builds can be found here.
Nice of you to drop by and I hope you enjoy the game!
I'll be back next month.
