Devlog #2 - Aiming and Inspirations

I'm not really sure what the frequency of devlog updates should be. I have a bit of a backlog, but I don't want to exhaust it immediately, so I'm just going to post up an update whenever I've done something new to fill it up. I feel a bit ill today, so forgive me if it's a bit out of whacks. I'll have more to say in the next one. 

Aiming and the Problem of how to do it. 

Aiming is very loose in most survivor games, but it's still an important component in giving players a sense of control. I know its a common feeling to want to do something new and innovative, to stand out in the market, but there's no substitute for decent aiming. 

If every character had the same kind of attack, then it'd be simple though, and I hate making things simple for myself. I knew I wanted multiple characters with different attack ranges and types, so I had to make a system that was at least a bit flexible from the beginning, but I also didn't want to burst too many of my braincells to do it. 

To make things simple, I just had a parented aim reticle, visual for testing, and had it follow the mouse location. When the character attacked, it would spawn a little hitbox that I can change in and out depending on the character. Going to have to do something different when I do range characters, but spawning a moving projectil should be easy enough. 

Later on I parented the hit box so that it spawned and moved with the player. Even later on, I decided to die the spawning of the attack zones to the animation of the player so that it would spawn and die with the animation. Currently, the red circle has its own script for damaging an enemy. I know its not the best practice, but it works for a dirty prototype and is the lowest on the list of priority to change. There's a million other ways to do attacking, and I probably will change it so that it's more tied into the player itself, but the change itself would be relatively minor, just to clean up some code. 

Inspirations

I've mentioned before that I've taken a lot of inspiration from Hades and Death must Die. From the aiming and attacking alone, it's quite clearly taken from Death must die. My plan is to try and recreate what they've done before I start tweaking on it to make it a bit more of my own. I do really love their visuals on how enemies create attack zones before they strike, and you'll see more of that in the next post.