Prototype 2D - Game Development HERTS
Changelog
Full list of Changelog can be found here:
https://github.com/domopuff/Prototype2D/blob/master/Changelog
April 11th
Added Final Assistant Boss
The final stage did not include a procedural generated level. Instead, it entailed a pre-built level.
Added assistant boss state behavior and narrative text which follows once the assistant has been defeated.
The narrative was coded out using a coroutine which involves waiting for a few seconds before changing the text.
April 8th
Added future level
I wanted a vaporwave aesthetic for this particular level as this is the dimension where the time traveler came from. Vapor wave includes pinkish tints and cyperpunk elements. Example picture below.
Source: https://soundontime.com/vaporwave-aesthetic/
Added machine and liquid canister props
The liquid canister emits a poison gas when destroyed. Player and entities standing inside the gas cloud will take damage over time.
Added Turret enemy
Turrets were the given choice as they were used for self defence. If the player is too close to the turret, the turret will go into their attack state and start firing a rapid succession of projectiles. If the player moves away from the turret detection radius, they will enter their idle mode and retract.
Added Robot Enemy
These robots possess a powerful sniper rifle each. When a player is detected, a red laser beam will appear and track the player. The robot will also change its color to red. After 3 seconds, the robot will fire a fast moving projectile. This particular enemy serves to make the game much more challenging as the enemy sometimes could be out of sight and it is up to the player to dodge these projectiles and destroy these enemies.
April 7th
Added enemy spawn prevention radius
I ran a playtest with some of my friends and i realized this game breaking problem. Enemies sometimes spawned at the same position as the player and this caused the player to take damage unfairly. To remedy this issue, I ran a check on the player spawn position by drawing a physics circle overlap. Player detection was a public float in which i could control the radius of the circle.
Physics2D.OverlapCircleAll(player.transform.position, PlayerDetection);
The circle collider checks through all entities(wall and floor prefabs) and collisions which resulted in some lag. To prevent that, I gave it some conditions to check only for enemies.
if(hitColliders[i].tag == ("Enemies") && hitColliders[i]
To prevent the circle from detecting the player,
hitColliders[i] != boxCol && hitColliders[i] != edgeCol
If enemies are detected, destroy them. Hence, this created some breathable space for the player at the start of each generated scene.
Added in game timer (Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ixlIaMuhkbM)
I felt like the players needed a sense of how long they have played the game. As a result, I included a timer for the players to keep track of their playing time.
In Addition, I wanted to further the narrative concept by making the player lose certain amount of time whenever he fires his weapon. This is still in development.
Adjusted health pickups to drop only when player has lost health
Prior to this, health pickups were dropped by enemies even when the player had full health. This could be a potential exploit for the player to "conserve" health pickups and using them only when they had taken damage. To fix this, all I simply had to to do was to enable health drops only when the player's health is not full.
Further development could include increasing the drop rate of health pickups according to how much health the player has left.
April 4th
Object Pooling (Source: https://www.raywenderlich.com/847-object-pooling-in-unity)
The most important part of game development is optimization. Optimization refers to the cleaning up of junk codes and making the game take up minimal yet necessary CPU memory.
Initially the game was running fine with little to no lag. However as the game progresses, more enemies are spawned which results in more projectiles and being created. Hence, the process of creating(instantiating) and destroying are two of the most intensive operations in the game. To help lighten the load on the memory, we make use of object pooling. This refers to pre-instantiating gameobjects which are going to be used in the scene itself. For example, In the forest level, we know that bandits are going to fire projectiles. As a result, I would need to create an object pooler to instantiate these projectile gameobjects at the start of the scene. During the scene, the projectiles that are supposed to be created and destroyed are now being replaced by the activating and deactivating of the pre instantiated gameobject which is now the projectile.
In this case, I assigned 30 enemyskeleton projectiles to be pre-instantiated. We can see the highlighted projectile represents an activated version of that particular gameobject.
As a result of object pooling, there are lesser instantiate and destroy executions which results in a smoother gameplay experience.
April 3rd
Added Boss CutScenes
This is to preempt players that the current stage they are in is a Boss Stage rather than just going in blindly and encountering the boss.
Added Yakuza Boss
Yakuza Boss is an advanced version of the mafia enemy. He has a minigun that fires a rapid succession of projectiles in the shooting state. Using a random factor, the boss may have a chance to chase the player and if the player gets within the range of the boss''s katanta, he will swing his weapon, dealing 2 damage to the player.
The minigun settings:
The low cooldown rate allows projectiles to be triggered rapidly.
March 27th
Added Urban District Level
I wanted this level to portray a modern urban town to give a stark difference from the forest level. This level consists of mafia enemies.
The mafia has both ranged and melee attacks. They fire a burst of 5 projectiles and if the player gets too close to the mafia, it will instantiate a melee attack for a split second which deals 2 damage to the player.
Added Lamp Post and Car Props
Cars explode upon taking 4 damage. The explosion will damage both enemies and players, dealing 8 damage making it instant-kill. Hence this is to make the player more cautious about his/her surroundings and to use these props to their advantage in killing enemies.
March 20th
Added Portal Core
Portal Cores were added to facilitate the narrative storytelling in the game. Portal cores are items that are being dropped by Bosses. When picked up, they will activate the Level portal which will then transport the player into the future (next level).
Added Level Portal
Instead of using the regular pink stage portal, I decided to introduce a different type of portal to differentiate between stage and level transitions.
March 17th
Added Bandit Boss Sprites and Animation
Added States for Boss Bandit - Chase player and Shoot, Idle & Bush which spawns smaller enemy bandits. The issue with this set up is that due to the fact that the state names could not be read, I could not use the state machine to execute commands. To bypass that, I checked for the animator bools and used it as rules to execute commands.
The Boss Bandit consists of the bush state and chase state. In the bush state, the boss bandit has a 20% chance of spawning smaller bandits. This state serves as a vulnerable state for the player to attack the boss as the chase states will result in the boss bandit chasing the player and firing 5 high velocity projectiles. The Boss Bandit has a walking speed of 3000, making it slightly faster than the player.
Player Starting Invincibility
Added player invincibility of 1.5 seconds when the scene loads. This is to prevent cheap hits on the player (enemy spawns in the same location as the player and the player takes a hit).
March 16th
Added Forest Level
The level generator was designed to interchange different prefabs. As such this made it easier to create and generate multiple scenes.
Added the bandit enemy. They fire two projectiles with each burst.
I wanted a surprise element in which the bandits are able to spawn randomly from bushes in the environment.
How it works:
I created a bush prop which consists of a box collider. It constantly checks whether the player enters the collider. If it does, the bush prop game object will destroy itself and spawn a bandit enemy.
March 15th
Added Enemy Boss Snake
This was relatively fun to make as it involves creating transitions states (idle, walk, spit) for the snake boss. This was one of the main reasons as to why I wanted to create a a game like this - to create pattern specific behavior that gets increasingly harder.
How it works?
When the boss is initialized, it goes into the spawn state. In which, there will be a 5 second timer that activates itself. Once the timer reaches 0, the spawn state will transition into normal state in which the snake will start chasing the player and shooting a spread of five projectiles.
Normal State
void Normal_Update() refers to the continuous tick when the snake is in the normal state.
These are the codes/instructions that are continuously executed in the normal state.
In the normal state, the snake basically tries to locate the player by checking if there is line of sight with the player. This is done using a raycast function which fires a ray and check to see if the collider it hits is tagged as the Player. If yes, then the snake will move towards the player's position by the speed given.
March 10th
Added Loading Screen
I decided to add the loading screen because it gives some information as to what stage the player is currently in as well as serves as a short break between each stage.
Subsequently, I added in the year (2000 B.C.) to help facilitate the narrative of the game.
March 9th
Added Main Menu
It's not really a game without a main menu.
I was thinking if i could remove the play button and use this main menu stage as a sort of introductory stage in which the player could explore the controls and interact with the weapons.