Whoa – 100 days of development under my belt!
Kind of a brief entry this one – I thought I was done with adding extra gameplay stuff for the alpha but watching my son play the game I realised there were a few things that were a little unclear.
The main one was the location of ammo stashes. It’s really annoying when you run out of ammo (I’m still not 100% sure that I shouldn’t give the base weapon unlimited ammo) and sometimes, in the heat of battle, it’s hard to locate the nearest ammo cache onscreen or on the scanner. This is even more of an issue since I added enemy bones which clutter up the battlefield.
So I’ve added two new features to make it easier to locate ammo, shields and rocket pickups – I call these ‘pickup detectors’ and ‘pickup indicators’.
A ‘pickup indicator’ simply indicates the location of the nearest onscreen stash – they don’t appear if the user’s ammo, rockets or shields are maxxed out. Implementing these was fairly straightforward, though I did have a few issues getting the indicator to move nicely between two different stashes. In the end I settled on having the indicator ‘pop out’ and then ‘pop in’ again when the location of the nearest stash changes. In my libraries I have a method that allows one to set a ‘timed event’ on a particular sprite, this is an event that doesn’t get triggered until a certain amount of frames later. This functionality has proved extremely useful for this type of thing.
A ‘pickup detector’ shows the closest route to the nearest stash if it is not onscreen. I settled on a simple arrow at the edges of the screen for this – not subtle but it works. As these would be annoying if they hung around all the time they only appear when the user’s shields or ammo are critically low. The rocket detector appears whenever a rocket pickup is present as these are pretty rare and you don’t want to miss them when they do appear.
The ‘pickup detector’ was also pretty straightforward to implement – the most fiddly bit was getting the arrows to centre correctly depending on how many of them there are, even that wasn’t that much hassle though.
I think these features make the game considerably more playable – plus I just love the look of that tiny pixel text!
Dev Time: 0.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 100 days(!)
Pickup Indicators In Action
Showing The Pop In / Pop Out As The Closest Stash Changes
Please Sir – Where’s The Nearest Ammo Stash?
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