Small stuff…

Today I wasn’t feeling like tackling something big, so I decided to work on small stuff… After fixing some minor bugs, I looked at my task list and I saw something that shouldn’t be hard, but I was curious about: target prediction.

Up until now, the enemies would shot at the players current position, so unless the player shifted movement direction or stopped, the enemies wouldn’t hit with projectile weapons (beam weapons are immediate, so no problems there)… I added some target prediction, which takes the current movement vector, the distance from the target and the speed of the weapon and computes a probable target position which will be more accurate… And this is the result:

Dead… Over and over again… The game turns from a little easy to an absolute nightmare! Which, guessing by the success of games like “Super Meat Boy” or “Dark Souls”, fun for some people…

I’ve added an “accuracy” parameter to the enemies, which will make them a bit easier, but as soon as that value is set to about 60% or so, they go from Stormtroopers to Lucky Luke! So, now it’s a function of their difficulty factor (enemies in planets further away from the start are more difficult). Hopefully, this will make the player need to invest on gear before venturing to the harder edge planets, while keeping the game easy in the core planets.

Now listening to “Overture of the Wicked” by Iced Earth

Link of the Day: Found this ongoing collection of articles about particle system design, quite an interesting read, specially because it’s focused on the more architectural aspects, instead of the usual visual component. The link is for the first one in the series: http://www.bfilipek.com/2014/04/flexible-particle-system-start.html