Devlog Week 3

Week 3 Devlog

This week was actually productive! Who knew you could actually get a decent amount of work done when you're not busy watching 400 one piece episodes? This week, I managed to create a player attack that swings in 4 different directions, player hit knockback and hit particle effects for both the player and boss and a second boss attack which is a ring of lasers.

Starting with the player attack, this was sort of loosely implemented last week, although there were issues with the blurriness of the animation and controlling the speed of the animation. I managed to fix these issues to get the player attack working, and tweaked the speed of the attacks until it felt right. In order to get the player to be able to attack in four directions, I just duplicated the first attack object and rotated them, then toggle visibility and collision depending on if the player was attacking in that direction or not. Another small feature I added was just a quality of life thing, where the direction of the up and down slice would actually change depending on which way the player was facing, as it bugged me that it wasn’t switching

Attacking facing right and left (it's hard to get the entire animation in one frame ok)

Also I added pogoing, one of my favorite features from hollow knight. If you attack down and hit the boss, it bounces you up allowing you to constantly bounce on his head. It is fun trust me + also hitting the boss gives particle effects to indicate you did actually land a hit

Feedback from last week's tutorial was mostly on how I could add some knockback and effects when getting hit to make the lethal looking spike attack pack a punch. Thus, I decided that upon getting hit, the player would be knocked back and up a bit opposite the direction they were facing, and that some particles would fly out of them when they got hit. And after implementing and tweaking the values, I really like it and think it has just the right amount of knockback and particle size to indicate that you got hit whilst also not being too annoying. 

it looks better in motion, also because the sprite updates aren’t locked when getting hit, looking up and down in the hit animation looks really smooth

The second boss attack implemented was a laser beam attack, which I’m sure came from some boss I’ve seen before, but I can’t quite think of it exactly yet. The attack summons lasers in a circle that rotate. They will become inactive at certain intervals allowing the player to quickly pass through them to avoid them. Whilst I like this attack, and I think it is reasonably balanced with the spike attack at the moment, I would like something to encourage the player to move around the arena or stay off the ground, as I want players to engage with the pogo mechanic I implemented earlier since I find it really fun.

I also added a health bar for the player, visible in the top left of the screen. Initially, I wanted some fancy blue icons to represent health, except it completely didn’t fit with the game, so I decided simple white boxes is the most aesthetically pleasing art I can accomplish. Nothing happens unfortunately when you lose all your health though.

At the peer session, there was some feedback about the mouse controlling the player attack. In particular, although I use WASD to control the direction of the player's attack, the act of attacking is tied to the mouse. A peer kept on getting slightly confused as it sort of seems like the player should attack in the direction of the mouse. To fix this, I am going to either add enter as a keybind for attacking, or figure out how to make the mouse disappear, as the presence of the mouse isn’t needed to play the game and would only distract the player

For next week, I still have a ton to do. I want to add boss health and ai, making it cycle between moving locations and firing attacks, and I want to add simple menus and a game over screen when the player dies.

Oh yeah I added a gradient background for some reason