Core Gameplay:
The template doesn’t provide any logic for the enemies other than bobbing up and down, so my main focus was in giving them the ability to detect and fire at the player. I used a similar system from the microFPS project and mixed it with the existing system for the player in this template, allowing the editor to customize the enemy’s detection range, fire rate, max ammo, and reload rate. I attempted to give them the ability to path on waypoints (a patrol route) so that they could move in more advanced paths but in my many attempts they would often disregard the waypoints and keep moving in some strange direction or disappear entirely. In the end I just kept the simple bobbing due to time constraints. I also wanted there to be variation in weapons, but because the bullets were directly coded in 2D format using right/left instead of vectors, it would require time to change the system, and I wanted to make sure that I could finish the general layout of the project before working on details.
I saw in many comments on my last game that I made the difficulty scaling too easy, so I wanted to make this game harder. Right off the bat, with the cam and the low acceleration of the character, I figured maybe I could lean into the annoying controls a bit like in “Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy,” so I added a bunch of areas that required fairly precise timing and control. In the end, I felt it was best to rectify these controls anyway, changing the cam to follow the character more rigidly and make the acceleration of the character faster, so there was less of a drag effect.
Design:
I stuck entirely to the art assets provided with the template, I’m no artist and the ones I found in the asset store were scarce didn’t match thematically, and I prefer cohesiveness over variation.
Final Notes:
My hope was to make the game similar to Megaman, or something like Doorkickers:Squad, but unfortunately I had a problem with my hard drive all week causing constant BSODs, and I only managed to find a half-decent fix as of Sunday afternoon, fortunately it seemed to have stemmed from some level of data corruption (probably from all the BSODs), which I’ve cleared out, and I’m assuming a loose SATA cable which I’ll have to fix at some point.
Link to Game: