After all the work yesterday on the raycasting system, today I fine-tuned the shooting some more, and it feels way better! After this, I balanced the beam cannon and found some errors on the damage levels, so I had to retune all the rest of the weapons, while playing around with some plasma burns: Because […]
Yesterday, while playing around with the beam cannon, I found some bugs on the collision detection, so today I dived right into that… The current method for raycasting on the voxel map is to do sampling: start at the beginning of the ray and walk through it, checking if it is a solid cell. Of […]
While playing around with the beam cannon, I found some visual glitches with the line drawing code, which ended up not being solvable by simple methods (they were basically a consequence of trying to use a line to draw what’s more accurately a cylinder). So, after trying to fix this still using the line code, […]
For “Gateway”, shooting is the main action, which means it has to be perfect… “Perfect” can mean a lot of stuff for different people, but for me it means that the player hits what he aims at… With a 3d view and a 2d input device (the mouse), this can be really challenging! Case in […]
Today I’m fiddling around with the electro-cannon… This is a weird weapon, because it works differently if the player fires hit or the enemies… When the player hits an enemy with the electro-cannon, they get stunned for a short while… When the player is hit, it just takes damage… I wasn’t happy with it… The […]
Spent most of today fine tuning more weapons, mainly the pulse cannon… The pulse cannon is one my favorite weapons, because the build up time let’s the player prepare for the shot, which makes it cool to avoid! Also added a plasma burn to the place where it hits, because it’s cool… Also spent some […]
Some more balancing today, switching between weapon balancing/testing and experimenting with some gameplay mechanics… I know they should be locked down by now, but I can’t help myself… First change in the gameplay is that shields no longer have a fail rate… It was just looking weird, and I can achieve the same actual result […]
Today I mostly worked in balancing the weapons… Not much to say about it, I basically just spawn an enemy with different weapons and different levels, and see how does it feel… Then I adjust it and try it again, over and over again… The game so far was “mathematically balanced”, which means I had […]
Carried on the work from yesterday, fine tuning the shooting mechanisms… It’s now working properly, with two easily adjusted parameters, and I even have a new parameter for the accuracy of the weapon (a machine gun shouldn’t hit as often as a pistol). The high-level enemies may still have too much accuracy, but on the […]
Working on a new AI shooting system… The current system uses a sine-wave altered by the danger level of the enemy and some parameters (frequency and threshold)… This is hard to control, and the fact that enemies shoot or not against you is dependent on where in the curve you’re at the moment… So, I […]