Day 5 (Morning) – Sparks Fly
Development time: 270 minutes (running total: 1030 minutes).
This morning was one of those rare occasions when I had just enough time to finish everything I intended. I won’t pretend it was anything beyond luck, but it still feels nice. There is now a visible science stat generated by surviving scientists, gets used up in a burst of sparks when hitting enemies, and gives a nice boost to damage.
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| Science stat at work. |
I used a
scrollbar to mimic a progress bar for the science meter, which was very quick and close enough to what I want. The game controller keeps track of the amount, and the code for scientists to generate it and the damage amplification is trivial. I added sparks using a particle emitter – ideally I would use a single emitter, perhaps attached to the crowbar, and have it emit bursts of particles, but I had some trouble accessing the emitter programatically so decided to cut my losses and use the less efficient option of instantiating emitters from a prefab and destroying them after a few seconds.
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| Death by science. |
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| Not the prettiest sparks in the world, but good enough without spending long on them. |
With the science stat working close to the way it was originally envisaged, I tackled the final major problem with gameplay. Up to this point the crowbar’s movement has been limited to a plane a few units above the ground, and had to be waved through the enemies like a magic wand to make them die. That isn’t the sort of feel I’m going for, and meant that mindlessly flailing back and forth was a winning strategy. To get more of a bludgeoning feel, I moved the basic plane of movement up to about the scientists’ head height, well above the hopping height of enemies, and added a bashing animation activated by a keypress.
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| A jaunty angle |
The movement uses a coroutine that activates over several physics update frames. It moves down and rotates forward for 4 frames, then does the reverse. The rotation uses local coordinate space, whereas the movement uses world space – the default local space movement would cause a net forward movement due to tilting of the y axis, which isn’t desired here.
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| At last, some proper bludgeoning… |
With these changes I’m just about ready to try for some sort of difficulty balance, but I’ll be leaving that to the last minute since it’s a task that can balloon out to any number of hours, and I can make up lies about the target audience if people start claiming it is too easy or difficult.
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| …to death! |
Goal for day 5 (afternoon/evening): survival and special effects.
Survival mode isn’t properly functional after the spawner changes made for campaign mode, so I’ll spend a little while getting that back up and running. Tutorial mode can wait until tomorrow or later, but I’ll add some basic instructions to the main menu as a stopgap. I’ll spend any remaining time today on adding some textures, models and audio.
