Devlog - Enemies and Interaction

‘Enemies and interaction’ is the subject of this week’s devlog.

Overview and implementation

Previously the game consisted of a player that could move around and shoot a laser, which was really just visual. This week, I worked on making a basic enemy which chases the player, attacks, and can be attacked. Stuff that I implemented this week:

An ‘robot’ which follows the player around the map
 - Robot behaviour adapted from the Mover and Seek tutorial scripts.

When a robot makes contact with the player, the player takes damage at a constant rate
 - Adapted from the HurtOnCollision tutorial script.

When a robot is hit by the player’s laser beam, it takes damage. If it drops to 0 hit points, it dies
 - When the laser beam collides with a robot, it tells that robot to subtract some health, at regular intervals.

Robots are spawned at a constant rate. Presently, there are two spawn points where the robots always appear
 - The two spawn points consist of invisible game objects that have scripts that spawn a robot, wait, spawn a robot, wait, and so on.

Enemy movement

Fighting with the laser beam

Respawning

All the time-based stuff (spawning, damage over time) was implemented using coroutines. Coroutines allows a piece of code to be executed before waiting some time, doing other stuff, then coming back to execute the code once again. In this way the laser beam can do some damage, and then give Unity time to attend to all the other stuff going on in the game before coming back to the laser beam (and doing more damage).

Review and feedback

No bugs were discovered in this week’s testing (yay! My code works!) However, gameplay wise, Super Survival is a little lacking. Enemies just keep spawning over and over again at the same locations. There is one type of enemy that has very one-dimensional behaviour. Perhaps most importantly, there is no difficulty curve.

One user figured out that if you position yourself in the corner of the map and let the enemies come at you from one angle, you can consistently kill them faster than they can get to you, leading to a stale, unlosable game state.

Corner strategy

As the focus so far has been functionality rather than fun, all of this is to be expected. However, now that the basic skeleton of the game is implemented – a player that can move and attack, and enemies that the player can fight – I can start to focus more on the fun side. This includes the visual feel and aesthetic of the game, which is the focus of the coming week. Beyond graphics, I hope to implement:

• A couple additional enemy types, that behave in different ways
• A difficulty curve that ramps up over time (with spikes and lulls in the action)
• More ‘bounciness’. By this I mean things like adding knockback to attacks, and a feeling of momentum to the player’s movement