Sunday, 14 August 2016

Psychon 2 - Update

It's been another fairly productive few days continuing development on Psychon 2.

Five varieties of cabbage
The enemy AI has been improved - the little robots now chase after you when they see you. I wrote a line-of-site function using vectors for this before noticing there is functionality already in Defold to cast rays. I've not looked at this in detail yet but will modify the code to use physics.ray_cast if it turns out to be suitable.

Sentries have been added and have turned out to be quite formidable enemies. There's a trick to defeating them though! They work similarly to the robots and have a proximity trigger using a collision object. They're fixed position but can rotate and shoot laser bolts at the player.

Sentries: a world of pain
Some other peripheral stuff has been added or improved. The in game OSD has been neatened up and various fades and transitions between the front-end and the game added. These help make it feel more like a cohesive game - though there's still lots to do.

Next on the list is making the mini-map - something the player will likely need in order to track down the crystal fragments on each level. Even I get lost in there sometimes.

I'm putting off re-arranging the various collections to allow different levels to be loaded. I'm not confident yet I know fully what to do. There's plenty of reading material in the API reference and on the Defold forum to help though.

video of gameplay