The BitBull Blog

So for the last couple of days or so I’ve been doing an awful lot of playtesting and making what should be the final round of tweaks, improvements and bugfixes for the playable alpha. A large amount of this has been general tweaks to difficulty levels and the like which would be too numerous to list here but here’s a few specifics as to what’s been included…

Weapon Stashing
In order to prevent the player from overpowering one weapon and simply sticking with that I now switch to the default weapon on losing a life and completing a level. This isn’t such a big deal at the moment as there are only three weapons but there will be a lot more in the final game. In addition to this, weapons are no longer automatically reloaded when ‘swapped out’ meaning it’s possible to stash an empty weapon. As a consequence I’ve also made weapon crates display the amount of ammo in the included weapon. Stashed weapons retain their ammo between levels.

Controls
I’ve tweaked the controls a bit so that they are a bit less ‘binary’ and it’s easier for the player to make smaller movements. There’s a fine line here between being able to make subtle movements and being able to move quickly when necessary. I’ve moved to using lerp-based interpolation for the player’s vertical speed and also added the ability to ‘brake’ (cancel horizontal motion) by pulling directly down on the controller.

Camera
Slight improvements to make the camera track better when running away from enemies (ie not track as if you’re trying to attack an enemy that’s behind you). Again there’s a fine line here as sometimes you are ‘dogfighting’ with an enemy that’s behind you so what I do is make a decision based on how long the player has been moving in the same direction. Rapid changes of movement tend to mean dogfighting, continuous movement tends to mean running away!

Input And UI Labelling
I’ve checked all the dialog buttons in the game for keyboard and controller input and labelled them appropriately depending on the input method being used. If the game receives any controller input I presume the player is playing with a controller, otherwise I assume a keyboard is being used. I’ve also made dialog buttons and a few other UI elements respond to mouse input just for a ‘belt and braces’ approach. the game itself can’t be played with a mouse though.

Instructions
I’ve added some pretty minimal (but hopefully sufficient) instructions and a diagram of controls for both keyboard and controller input.

Enemy Randomizer
I’ve made yet more tweaks to the code that generates the levels so there’s a much better distribution of enemies. I’ve added a ‘Config’ class that contains all the definitions for enemy/weapon intro levels and difficulty settings in one place so it’s much easier to edit.

Baiters/Bastards
These are the enemies that appear when the player is taking too long to complete a level. Originally I had it so they didn’t need to be destroyed in order to complete a level (as in Defender) but I thought it was a bit weird getting the ‘all enemies destroyed’ message when there were enemies still present. Now the baiters have to be destroyed too but no additional baiters will appear once all other enemies have been defeated.

Bugfixes
Fixed a bunch, one of the most amusing ones was where an enemy’s jetboard would continue to fire after the enemy had been killed (if it was armed with an automatic weapon). This was funny but I couldn’t leave it in.

Now I have to decide whether I’m going to create a proper installer for the alpha (and build it if so) or just distribute a zip file – then you should be able to have a go!

Dev Time: 2.5 days
Total Dev Time: approx 111.5 days

previous|next