Kilan Larsen
370 Blog Post 4
For this sprint I worked on improving the feedback of the player's actions, and adding powerups to add intrigue and more movement options for the player. To start, I used a slider to create a reload bar so that the player can visually tell when the gun is reloading, and show how long they need to wait before firing again. The bar floats above the player character's head and is hidden until a reload starts, and then is hidden again once the reload is complete. This was done in order to put the most relevant information right where the player is looking, and only show it when it is needed.
While the reload bar is great at telling you when you are in the process of reloading, it doesn't help display an ammo count, and players wouldn't know how to perform a manual reload. To solve this, I added ammo sprites on the HUD to represent the number of shotgun shells the player has left in the gun, and a text display to show which button to press in order to manually reload.
During our second playtest we did encounter a small issue with this however, since the player only starts with 1 ammo then the manual reload function is pointless at the start. This caused a player to believe the game was broken even though it was working as intended, so to fix this I will have the reload text and button prompt only appear once the player has at least 2 ammo.
The next task on my to-do list was to create a series of upgrades for the player to enable a wider variety of gameplay. The upgrades are:
- Ammo count +1
- Increased shot knockback
- Shots can break certain walls
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These turned out to be quite simple to add to the game, as each one (other than the wall break) just modifies an existing variable on the player controller. To do the wall break I added a 'canBreakWalls' bool to the player and bullet scripts which are set to true once the player picks up the upgrade. When a bullet hits a breakable wall, it checks if the 'canBreakWalls' bool is true before calling the function to break it. I also added a simple particle effect to make breaking walls more satisfying.
To make the upgrades as intuitive as possible for both our level designer (Chris), and our players, I included a couple of features in the script to make it easy to use.
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For the player, each upgrades has an icon to show roughly what it does, and a description panel to give more info into its functionality.
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For the level designer, I added all of the modifiable stats as public variables so that each upgrade can be customized as needed. This way, we can easily adjust the knockback amount of the knockback upgrade, or the ammo increase amount of an ammo upgrade.
Overall, players seemed to really enjoy these additions to the game during our second playtest! The main thing that is still missing is adding some weapons to the enemies so that they pose more of a threat, and adjusting the level design based on the feedback we received.
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Two builds down, one more to go, let's do this!