Dev Log #004 Echo's of Salvation

Lots of new weapons, Ammo system and some enemy AI.

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The Weapon Arsenal

While working on the weapon system I made it a high priority for it to be as scalable as possible. This gave me the perfect workflow to make weapons and animations. Currently there is now 6 different weapon choices and they all have their purposes. I wont go through all the weapon types but there is a link to a video at the bottom where my partner explains all the weapon types. There is one missing from the video that I will talk about and that the plasma rifle. This works similar to Halo's and DOOM's plasma rifle in that the round that it fires move a lot slower than regular ammo however they don't lose velocity or damage over distance. The plasma rifle does a low amount of base damage however its effectiveness lies in its ability to shred through enemy shields (another thing that's been added).

Ammo

For the ammo system I decided that since these weapons are all energy based they done have your typical magazine and ammo reserve. Instead they use an energy level system where each round fired reduces the energy reserve depending on the weapon. There is three types of ammo which are standard, special and heavy. The ammo pickups are colour coded so that each weapon fires rounds that are coloured in there according ammo type. This is similar to Destiny with glowing boxes that represent the ammo pickups.

Enemy AI

My partner in crime has merged his AI work with mine and it looks awesome. Currently we have two enemy types which are a lizard and a spider. The lizard is melee based and has two different attacks. There is a lunging type attack and a ground slam attack which both do similar damage but the ground slam is initiated from a further distance. The spider is a ranged enemy and will chase the player until close enough to shoot its webs at the player.

Damage System

With the addition of the enemies I needed a universal way of applying damage to damageable characters or objects. I created a damage component that uses interfaces to query the object that is hit to see if it can take damage. The component allows health and health regen functions to be easily implemented and customised across different classes.

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Current State of The Game

With the deadline for this project we are putting on the afterburners with plans to add abilities and some more enemies while polishing what we already have. The game is very much on track to be finished by the deadline and with scalability in mind there will be many more aspects added later. Here is the demo video of our prototype