I’m now two weeks into developing a game and sharing my journey with you all here. As with last week, I have made some progress that I’m eager to share with you all, so let's dive right in shall we?
Catching up
This project started when I decided to spend November making a game. The game would be a first-person shooter in the style of the 90’s classics Doom and Quake, for a handful of reasons. Check out November 1st’s article for more details on these decisions, and my initial thoughts on the project’s direction. One week of progress determined that building everything around a central rhythm beating in time with the background music was a feasible approach, though doing so certainly brought its own challenges. For more details on how we got there, give November 8th’s article a glance. Which brings us to today.
The Guns
A major part of any first-person shooter is the weapons the player has at their disposal to, you know, shoot things. To that extent, I currently have six different weapons to provide the player:
Melee: For the time being, this is mostly a safeguard option for the player. Since all of the other weapons use ammunition, a limited resource, the player will always be able to give enemies a whack in emergencies. However, because everything else is designed with ranged combat in mind, the melee option will likely be kept weak to encourage the player to engage with the more interesting gun-based combat instead.
Pistol: The pistol is the player's introduction to the guns of the game. Its low amounts of damage per shot solidifies its identity as an introductory gun, while giving the player plenty of pistol ammunition encourages them to experiment with the shooting mechanics of the game. Of the guns, it is the fallback option for when everything else fails, while still being a more consistently useful option than the melee. This may change however, since the pistol and melee occupy a very similar space in the player’s arsenal.
Rifle: The bread-and-butter weapon. This gun fires faster than the pistol, giving the player an option to steadily work their way through higher health enemies. Alternatively, this is a more efficient weapon to use against weaker enemies, but that is a decision the player must make since its ammunition is more limited than that of the pistol.
Shotgun: The close-range, burst weapon. At close ranges, this gun is a much more powerful weapon than the rifle, due to the multiple pellets released every shot. However, since these pellets spread out as they travel, this gun deals significantly less consistent damage at longer ranges. This encourages the player to engage melee enemies from closer ranges, thus creating more intense combat scenarios.
Sticky bomb launcher: This weapon is meant to provide the player a way to do large amounts of damage to enemies in an area from longer ranges. The downsides are 1)ammunition for this weapon will be scarce, 2) the player can hurt themselves with the explosions, and 3) the projectile will take time to travel from the player’s weapon to their target. This gun started the week as a rocket launcher, but it felt out of place to have rockets explode out of sync with the music. Adjusting the rocket’s speed to help ensure it impacts its target at the same time as a beat in the music would make it very difficult to consistently hit enemies; instead, I chose to add a delay between the rocket’s impact and explosion. This meant rebranding the rocket launcher as something that would more logically have such a delay, and the result was the sticky bomb launcher. Sticking the bombs to whatever they impact means that when the player directly hit enemies with these explosives, they are still rewarded for their skillful aim.
Lightning gun: The lightning gun provides a more consistent alternative to the sticky bomb launcher. It zaps the first enemy struck by its bolts before spreading a lesser charge to nearby enemies. It does not have as much range as the rocket launcher, nor does it do as much damage: a necessary tradeoff to help encourage the player to use the weapon when they also have the rocket launcher available. This gives the player who might not be as proficient aiming projectiles an area-of-effect option against clustered enemies.
With this arsenal, the player has options for how to engage enemies from short, medium, and long ranges. Limiting the available ammunition for each weapon will encourage the player to use a variety of weapons. Multiple enemy types will also help present the player with a wider variety of challenges they must use these weapons to overcome, so I spent some time last week planning out the enemies too.
The Enemies
My first lesson learned about implementing computer controlled enemies is that programming AI behavior is HARD. It is something that I probably should have had more familiarity with going into this project, but instead I spent a healthy chunk of time last week learning how to use the systems Unreal Engine provides developers. Coulda, shoulda, woulda. But I did have some success, and now have a few small red blobs chasing me around whenever I test the level. As you can see below, it’s a little unsettling.
For the moment, I have three different enemy types I would like to implement before this month is over:
A basic melee enemy, who relies on appearing in high numbers to pose a threat to the player. Alone, this enemy should not be very challenging to overcome.
A basic ranged enemy, who can consistently deal small amounts of damage to the player when not dealt with swiftly, but should be similarly simple to kill.
A more advanced ranged enemy, who inconsistently deals noticeable amounts of damage to the player, and poses enough threat to make sure the player respects the amount of threat they pose.
I anticipate that these enemies will be the most labor-intensive part of this project (at least, for the next two weeks), so I want to limit the variety I have to create for now. These three should provide enough variety to create at least a handful of unique combat encounters, which in turn should be enough to fill out the one level I hope to complete by December.
And that’s where I stand moving into the third week of development. The next 2-3 weeks are going to be very busy, but as always I’m excited to see where this game takes me. In the meantime, I hope you’ve armed yourself to have a good week, and I’ll see you next time!
-Mark