Day3 - hit and miss. literally.

saluk on 2010/08/25 08:46 of The legendary 11th Century of the Fruitbat entry - f34r

So figuratively today was very hit and miss. I DID a lot, but I don't know if very much of what I did actually moved the game towards completion status. So I feel like I exerted a lot of life energy without much to show for it. I don't think anything I did however could have been left undone, so I don't quite see myself going down the wrong road, which I guess is good.

I feel like there are basically two different types of development. There is the creation part, where you are actually implementing new systems, or rewriting significant algorithms. This is what I find the most fun. You sit down with a blank canvas, and an hour or two of dedicated hacking later, it DOES something that it didn't do before. I HAVE MADE FIRE, HEAR ME ROAR.

The other part is refinement. It's a lot of tweaking and integration. You take one of those pieces you built in step 1, and hammer it and shape it endlessly. I often find myself hammering these pieces for very large amounts of time, and not really enjoying myself doing so. In 10 minutes, I can make a character walk around a screen. It starts with nothing, and suddenly we have a cool little demo to play with. But then to figure out how fast he should move, what kind of collisions to use, etc, suddenly it turns into several hours of pretty boring stuff.

I think I will fare better if I spend a lot more time building, and a lot less time refining. My resolution at this point of the competition is to slap myself whenever I find myself hammering on something that is probably good enough. And if it's not good enough, maybe I should create a better piece instead of trying to make a bad piece fit.


Anyway, there is also the literal hit and miss I mentioned. One of the big components of my game is the hit detection during battles. You choose an enemy to aim at, but the actual detection of whether you hit them or not is based on line of sight. The angle you fire is randomized slightly based weapon accuracy and player skills. If the angle doesn't pass through the enemy, it is a miss. If you target someone on the far side of the room, but there are a bunch of people in the way, you're probably going to hit them instead of who you were aiming at. Eventually there is going to be cover to watch out for as well.


As you can see, in the right image, the shot was off target, and didn't connect. In the left image, it grazed the corner of the enemy and did some damage. Currently ai is pretty terrible, and they tend to kill each other off in a big group because they are trying to hit you :) I'm not sure how well I'll be able to overcome that, but I can probably get something that works well enough for what I'm going for. Since my game design has you fighting against hordes and hordes of enemies, even if they occasionally suffer friendly fire, it will probably still be quite a challenge to win.

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Comments

wary on 2010/08/25 16:06:

what about releasing beta version? ;) I am so lookoing foward fot this game! it looks very good! I think it is my most expected game!

saluk on 2010/08/26 00:34:

No beta - I don't expect to see a reasonable cohesion of gameplay come together until friday night, at which point its better to just wait a day for the game. If it comes together by then I will be happy. There's still a huge chance it won't come together at all. Right now it's a debug menu and a bunch of random weird editors and things :)

I'm glad you are looking forward to it, once again my ambitions are outweighing my ability. But what good is pyweek without at least attempting the impossible?

RB[0] on 2010/08/26 04:12:

Here here - exactly the Pyweek spirit saluk :D

Look forward to your game as well!