Devlog 7, 7/29
No Devlog for 7/28! We had some rough storms and it was best I take the day off for safety.
Progress is slow, but it is surely starting to come together. Some of the things I've done yesterday and today are:
- Set up functional UI that is responsive. The UI will now properly increment and adjust to real time statistics.
- Create Item Pickups that recharge the grenade and health of the player! As above, they also properly increment the UI so the player can see that they work. They also change color using modulate depending on if they can be used or not.
- Created my first enemy that can fire lasers at the player!
Its a very basic UI, but it gets the job done. I still have a counter for player ammo - a hold over from the original design where the main gun had an ammo resource. I feel its best if its just infinite, and the grenade does all the heavy lifting.
Apologies for the small gif, but it should show that there is indeed an enemy (and if you see a red dot, thats a pick up!). The enemy has a hitbox range thats very adjustable, and will probably need to be adjusted eventually. Right now, projectiles are queue_free after two seconds, so I need to make sure that the enemy doesn't fire beyond that range (or the player can outrange the enemies for that matter..)
Right now, the enemy doesn't have a real health bar, but I feel that I'm starting to understand the logic of coding a bit better. To me, it seems like I need to set some variables in global that dictates enemy health, much like how it currently dictates the player HP. Then assign a value to the laser that says it -= that variable by x amount, and then if the globals.enemy_hp is == 0, then queue_free the enemy from the tree. No more enemies! It would also work for the player. This is already 3/4 of the way there towards a victory/lose condition as well, where I can add additional code to those elements to immediately transition the current scene to a pre-made "Victory!" or "Lose!" Screen.
Right, so for Sunday, 7/30, I'm thinking the following should be nice:
- Get the health values and damage values worked out
- get the enemy to follow and fire at the player.
- maybe work on an enemy that does a short range melee attack, giving the laser enemy some breathing room. (Though, I think I see some issues with this. The enemy laser is just copying the player laser, which means it would cause friendly fire... Do I need to create a secondary laser thats just for enemies to use, that ignores enemies? This is probably not too hard to do, but I wonder if its inefficient versus another coding example that might make things work better...)
- Work on the scene transitions to quickly create a win/lose screen.
If I can get even most of these done Sunday, I should be left with plenty of time to really give the last week a run for my money! This is exhilarating, though I've definitely begun to felt the creeping sensation that it wont be done. I have to hunker down, ignore the distractions, and get working.
Devlog out!