Into production

The first week of production is over and we already got some basic functionality of our game up and running:

• Basic movement
• Dash
• Rotating the cannon
• Shooting:
  • Default projectiles
  • Bomb projectiles
• Basic multiplayer
• Camera
• Art assets - the main tower

Basic movement

One of the first things necessary for our game was the basic movement. The player controls his castle with the left joystick, the whole castle also turns so it's always facing the direction it's going. We use accelerated movement so there's also a bit of skill involved in just moving around the map.

Dash

The dash makes the movement a little bit more interesting, in prototyping face we enhanced the current velocity when dashing. This time we found a better way, where we use the input of the player. Now it's impossible to dash when the left joystick is untouched, it also makes it possible to break the accelerated movement and do a 180 dash in the opposite direction. We also moved the dash button to the left bumper (L1) to make it easier to move and dash at the same time.

Rotating the cannon

Because our button layout was a bit weird in the prototyping phase, we decided to move the rotating of the cannon to the right joystick (coming from the triggers). This was a bit of a struggle to implement, because we had to take into account the rotation of the castle as well. We'll see when we playtest this if we also want the cannon to rotate with the castle if the right joystick is untouched, or if we want it to keep aiming at the same spot.

Shooting

As of right now there is no health yet, but you can already start to shoot at eachother! Pressing the right bumper (R1) will shoot a bullet. When the bullet hits it will also give a little knockback to the player at the receiving end.

Default projectiles

The default projectiles are regular cannon balls that fly in a straight line.

Bomb projectiles

The bombs are special projectiles that will only be enabled when picking up a corresponding pickup. They drop to the floor and explode after a certain time or if another bomb explodes closeby. Right now it doesn't do damage yet, but the damage will be dependant on how close to the bomb you were when it exploded.

Basic multiplayer

As you could see in the gifs above, we already implemented a way to play with two players to be able to playtest with multiple players already. We wrote a basic game manager that spawns in the players at the start of the game and assigns them their player number and their spawn location.

Camera

The camera in our game does not have to be really advanced and actually a purely static camera would also work. But as a team we decided we'd like to do something more than that with our camera. Right now our camera already searches for the most optimal zoom ratio (we still have to tweak the values, but the code is there) and makes sure all the players are in view. It should give us as much overview as possible, but we don't want a pure top down view, because we're using the model of the castles to show off their state (healthy, 'injured', etc..). A lot of the code that was used in the prototyping phase was thrown away and we made a new and improved camera, with less code and more use of built-in functions from Unity. We also tried to add a smoother movement to the camera, but we'll have to increase this smoothness still a little bit, as we now can see that the dash still incurs quite a harsh transition. We also started on adding some camera shake, as of right now, this code is never triggered, as we'll use this for the environmental events (volcanic eruptions, etc), but we have a nice basis to start off with when we get there.

Art assets - the main tower

We created the assets for the main tower. This tower is the one in the middle that represents the health of the player. That's why there's three different models, they will get swapped out when a certain health threshold is reached, so players know when they're getting low on hp.

The remaining parts of the castle are already in blockout phase so those will go faster. Next up on the list is the base for the tower where the cannon will reside.

This week some other prototype meshes also had to be created (e.g. some terrain tiles for terrain generation), otherwise the programmers can't start on those scripts yet. As we only have one artist in our team, some parts of the art will be done by programmers (but those come later: particle systems and UI drawings).

In general our team is heading in the right direction and we notice the prototyping phase has brought us a lot of merits, things go a lot faster and we can now structure things better, because we know what's coming.

We're looking forward to next week!

Cheers,

The Devs