Thu, Sep 13, 2018
I've finally returned to SF, and I've been pretty busy getting settled in. By that I mean updating a month-old computer and a library of games and getting prepared for the Hack Reactor Structured Study Program (I'm still a bit confused on what we're going to be doing in there) and the Mission Bit Unity class I'm instructing next week.
The next couple weeks are going to be hectic, to say the least. In the Unity class, I'll be teaching design, as no C# is necessary thanks to the 2D Game Kit. It has zero flexibility and documentation, and is aimed purely at designing a simple puzzle/action platformer without code. Good for design lessons, but adding new mechanics is going to be a struggle.
The Hack Reactor SSP is all in JavaScript, and that's all I know about it. Hopefully it'll be fun.
I've finished up the basic enemy logic, which attempts to kamikaze into the player in a serpentine fashion. It's kind of weird, but it works. I'm thinking about adding a secondary HP to the game, where enemies getting past the player damages...something. Maybe a planet with inhabitants, a defenseless cargo ship, or whatever lore I can come up with. It's not completely necessary though, Luftrausers didn't have anything like that, after all. I'm only making this game purely for engineering experience. Here are the kamikaze enemies in action:
Click here to see a higher quality version on Gfycat.
The dogfighters, the next major enemy, are roughly finished. They hold their ground a bit, and track and shoot the player instead of flying into them. The problem is that their bullets are easy to miss since kamikaze enemies can cover up the bullets, so I'm finding a way to help the player see incoming damage.
I have a couple ideas:
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Spawn less kamikaze enemies when dogfighters are out
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Shrink the size of the enemy exhaust and make it disappear faster, since that's the biggest culprit hiding bullets
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Shrink the enemies themselves.
I have to do #2 for sure, and #1 relies on me actually getting to implementing the score delta of the game, which is my next goal after finishing up the last tidbit of dogfighter logic. They need to back up a bit when the player approaches, but not back up past the screen limit. They also need to disengage when the player is behind them, since they have no way of looping back around (YET!).
#3 I'll think about later, since I'm not sure how I feel about that yet.