So far this year I’ve been focussing on weapons and the weapon unlock/upgrade mechanic in preparation for doing the wider gameplay and difficulty balancing. I’ve broken this down into three key areas…

1. Ammo Drops 

It became clear whilst testing the bosses that the way I was calculating ammo drops was flawed and I needed a better method. The method I eventually came up with is simpler than its predecessor, works far more effectively and should ‘scale’ automatically as weapons are upgraded and the player faces enemies that soak up more ammo. For each weapon I now work out the maximum amount of damage that can be done to any enemy from a clip’s worth of ammo (the amount contained in a single ammo drop). I then scale this amount based on the accuracy of the weapon in question (weapons that have a lower accuracy scale down more as one must assume that not every shot will hit its target). Once the player has dealt out damage to any combination of enemies that exceeds the resultant ammo refresh rate a new ammo drop is awarded. It’s important to record the damage dealt as the amount of damage that would be dealt if the enemy had infinite health, otherwise enemies that are destroyed by the attack score too little and this can really skew the system.

To test this I set up a ‘sponge’ enemy that does nothing but takes loads of damage and tried out all the different weapons on it in turn, tweaking the accuracy scaling and checking the method I was using to calculate the max damage per clip was correct on each one. This was easy for weapons that simply fire bullet-style projectiles but more complex for weapons like the flamethrower. For ‘area of effect’ style weapons like the grenade launcher, RPG and sonic boom I can only really approximate an idea of maximum damage.

Whilst in the process of the above I got pretty distracted re-working the shotgun blast effect as it still didn’t seem to give an accurate indication of the blast’s area of effect. This is the third time I have re-worked this(!)

2. Weapon Switching 

To date the player has only been allowed to carry one weapon at a time. If the currently armed weapon runs out of ammo they were automatically switched to the default weapon (pistol) which has infinite ammo. If they wanted to arm a more powerful weapon again (pretty much guaranteed) they would have to pick one up from a weapon crate AND find an ammo drop to recharge it should it have run out.

I decided this mechanic was no fun and therefore, according to the Scott Rogers principle, had to go. Now I am allowing the player to carry two weapons at once – the default weapon with infinite ammo and a (generally) more powerful secondary weapon. If the secondary weapon runs out of ammo the player is switched automatically to the pistol as before but this time all they need to do to recharge it is collect an ammo drop. The new mechanic seems to feel much more natural and fun to me, though I’m a little worried it might give the player the opportunity to over-exploit powerful weapons but we shall see…

As an adjunct to the above I also implemented a key to switch weapons so that the player can switch to the pistol if they want to save ammo on powerful but understocked weapons such as the RPG.

3. Weapon Unlocks 

Previously, in order to unlock a weapon, the player had to catch the jetboard of an enemy that was armed with it. This worked OK, but it was a bit easy and I didn’t really think it made a big enough deal of the weapon unlock process.

I’ve decided instead to have weapon unlocks as a type of treasure. Rather than being guarded by a boss, the treasure chambers that contains these weapon unlocks will be guarded by a fleet of enemies armed with the weapon in question. This enables me to make more of the treasure chamber mechanic, adds another layer to the gameplay, and also allows me to use the big ‘weapon upgrade’ icons (which I was rather pleased with) in-game as pickups.

It didn’t take me long to design these ‘guardian’ enemies but I spent a fair bit of time on implementing some special AI for them. Firstly I enabled them to swoop down and steal the player’s health pickups to heal themselves (I may allow other enemies to do this once the reach a certain level), and secondly I implemented a special ‘wrap attack’ whereby if a bunch of them have been chasing the player in the same direction for some time a few will take advantage of the world wrapping by peeling off and heading in the opposite direction to meet the player head on!

The video demonstrates unlocking the shotgun by defeating a small fleet of enemy guardians. They’re pretty tough opponents – as you can see I had to rely pretty heavily on the jetboard attack here and was pretty lucky managing to take out three of them in one go!

Dev Time: 241.5 days 

Total Dev Time: approx 4.5 days