Games Practical Project Development Blog - Week #4

A lot of these week was spent researching important future topics, so not much engine work to show.

After last weeks, the plain red colour of the enemy hit flash looked really odd to me, so I played around with the material quickly. I added emissive and opacity to it and tweaked them so that the flash looked more natural.

The red flash material altered

Now that this was out of the way, I was inspired by my recent game-play of Kingdom Hearts 3, in which the players movement speed increases after they have been moving at max speed. This is something I played around with quite a bit, instantly making the max speed increase after a set of time, gradually increasing the speed over time, a combination of both by waiting a moment before allowing the speed to increase. After some play-testing, there was never one style either myself or play testers were comfortable with. After this testing I decided to leave the idea for now and potentially come back to the idea later on.

A version of the player movement speedup

Feeling like I hadn't really made much progress, and knowing that I would need to start researching a few different techniques I intend to use this week, I wanted to make sure I made some forward progress in engine. and got my first iteration of the enemy melee attack working. This uses some similar framework from the players melee attacks, fitted for the enemies range and stats. Coupling this I needed to make sure the player had health the enemy could take away, so I quickly got that into effect as well.

The enemies basic melee attack

During some casual play-testing it was decided that locking the players rotation while attacking felt unnatural, and made hit and run tactics too powerful, so I lowered the players rotation during their melee attack, still allowing for the player to aim their attacks while moving, and not constantly attacking in the direction they are moving. The player then gets their rotation returned to normal upon the end of the animation.

Initially lowering the players rotation

After this the majority of the week was spent researching cellular automaton, The Binding of Isaac's champion enemy system, animation editing, enemy AI (Particularly G.O.A.P) and on paper enemy planning.

Unfortunately because of this I don't have anything else to show as part of the project for this week.