Day 2- the groundwork

The first days are all about making the basic building blocks, that will make the next days easier for us.

At this point we have:

1. The FPS stuff

All the basic skills that our hero can use. In boomer-shootery shooter, that's running, jumping and shooting. And swapping weapons I guess. FPS starter kit from unity comes handy here- it has the movement mechanics already! After that implementing shooting is fairly easy- you do just a simple hitscan wherever your camera points! This could be a problem though, because we'd end up with a bunch of very precise weapons, and that's good for, like one weapon, but not for all! 

Parameters come to the rescue! With just those three (plus delay between shots, and damage) I can make all sorts of weapons!

Big values for bulletsInShot, maxBulletSpread, delayBetweenShots, but low damage on individual bullets, and you got yourself a nice shotgun! You want a machine pistol? Change full auto to true, and lower that delay between! Better yet! Lower the range do a meter and half, and you've got a mele weapon here! And only with just a bit over 150 lines of code.

2. POWERUPS and related systems

I heard they are somewhat important in this jam :)

The state of the player is divided between three classes. The first one is a simple one, tracking players health. In my game player character looses health slowly, but constantly (and when getting hit, but you knew that). Worse- when you go below 50%, you start getting slower, and your vision gets blurry! That's the second class- based on current health value it applies effects to player character. Our game doesn't have healthpacks. Instead every  POWERUP gives you some health, as well as some other effects. That's the third class- managing effects of the powerups. 

Now you might be thinking- "Just three classes"? Wouldn't you rather have also a class for every powerup effects, and have a manager, uhh... manage them?", and I would say "Yes, in a commercial project (or even any project that I have more than two weekends for), that's exactly what I would do!". But it's a jam, so one class for all the effects it is. And it's badly written :)

Other thing about implementing powerups on a first day? You get to test them early. That way I found out, that one of my powerups is absolutely terrible. That's on us- we should have seen that if we start with "we want to make a fast-paced game", we shouldn't go for "and then there is a powerup that SLOWS THE ACTION DOWN". No worries though! We figured out a new one! It's called "the taste explosion" if you were wondering.

3. Enemies! Ok, one enemy!

That guy you see at the top? The shark with legs and a shotgun? That's our first guy! I'll be working on him tomorrow (he has animations so far, but lacks AI), but he can shoot and walk in random directions! 

Now let's talk about, how we make our enemies force the type of gameplay we want. This guy has a gun, that's a hitscan weapon. That means bullets travel instantly. To balance it out, we broke his aim. Left shark, here, doesn't aim at you. He aims at an invisible target, that's always a bit behind you when you move. When you stop, it catches up, and the shark hits you! He'll also hit you, if you line up him, the target, and yourself. That makes charging the sharks headfirst a bad idea.

That's not bad for one and half days of work! Tomorrow, we'll talk about making multiple enemies with little effort, or how many things can be parametrized when making a boomer shooter enemy AI.