They are useful sometimes though so I do resort to them when I’ve got a lot of boring, fiddly stuff to finish and am having motivation issues. There is something mildly satisfying about crossing items off one by one which is why I always do them on paper – digital ‘to do’ lists are even worse.
So anyway, here’s what’s been on my ‘to do’ list and is now ‘done’. It’s pretty dull but then game development is a lot of the time I’m afraid (sorry to burst your bubble kids, Santa isn’t real either).
Add ‘Brake’ Functionality To Enemy AI
The jetboarding enemies were still kamikaze-ing into the player too often as I was relying on air friction to slow them down which just wasn’t slowing them down quick enough. I’ve given them the ability to air-brake – it’s a bit of a cheat as the player can’t do this without turning round but it looks a lot better.
Make Enemies Drop Ammo
I’m pretty sure it’s going to be too easy to run out of ammo so I’ve added the ability for enemies to drop a small ammo cache when destroyed. Unlike the larger ammo pickup (which completely recharges the current weapon) this one just adds one ‘clip’ of ammo.
Add Pickups And Warp Gates To Scanner
Self explanatory – needed to be done and involved a bit of messing around with class hierarchies.
Improve Rider vs Board Collisions
I felt the way this was working was inconsistent so I’ve added a separate collision check for the rider and the board. A Rider vs rider collision won’t cause any damage the bulk of the time, health is mainly lost when a rider collides with an opposing jetboard.
Add ‘Teleport In’ Effect For Enemies
I was presuming all enemies would be there at the start of each level but after playing ‘Defender’ some more I’ve decided I’m going to need batches of enemies that appear as a level progresses which means I’m going to need some kind of ‘teleport in’ effect. I’m using the same effect I used for the player and wanted to duplicate as little code as possible so, again, needed to mess with the class hierarchies a fair bit to get this to work.
Remove Permanent Enemy Health Displays
I thought this looked a bit dumb when there were lots on enemies on screen so now the enemy health bars automatically show/hide as they take damage. Thankfully this code was already shared with the player and it was just a matter of turning the ‘auto-hide’ feature on.
Add Scanner To HUD
In the code scanner and HUD they were separate which resulted in some stupid duplication of code when switching shaders for the level teleport effect. This is structured much better now.
Fix Scanner Wrap Bugs
Items on the scanner were getting cropped when they crossed the wrap point of the game world. Fixed this by drawing them twice in this scenario at both the left and right of the offscreen image.
Tidy Up Scanner
Changed the way the ‘screen marker’ is positioned as this was overlapping some scanner elements and also fixed an int rounding issue which meant that scanner items with an odd number of pixels in width weren’t getting aligned correctly.
Fix Board Flashing After Player Death
You can see this in some of the previous GIFs – the player’s jetboard was rendering with the ‘collision’ shader when the player continued to get pummeled by bullets after he’d died. I’ve changed this so the jetboard only does this if the player is riding it.
Can’t Collect Pickups After Warp Gates Appear
Dumb bug – fixed!
Carry Last Weapon Over Between Lives
Rather than starting with the default weapon each life.
Weapon Crate Icon Not Showing After New Level
Dumb bug – fixed!
Some Enemy Bullet Trails never Disappear
Dumb bug – fixed! This one was quite a hard one to track down.
And that’s the list all crossed off (for now). Looking forward to actually starting to refine the gameplay!
Dev Time: 1 day
Total Dev Time: approx 31.5 days
The Improved AI With Braking
Enemies Now Drop A Small Ammo Cache
Gameplay Viewed On The Improved Scanner
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