Over the past week I’ve added some simple mechanics that I had planned for including a round / wave system and a simple weapon upgrade system. The weapon upgrade system is what I spent most of my time implementing, it included a spawner that moves side to side off screen and will drop a weapon upgrade on a timed interval. I took inspiration from older SHMUP’s where the upgrades would come down in a random area and the player would have to constantly be aware of where the upgrades are coming from, rather than the spawn positions being static and predictable. When the player starts a new game they will only have the “Laser Mk1” and the “Missile Mk1” which utilise the front two muzzles on the players vehicle. Every time the player picks up an upgrade, an extra two muzzles will be usable. Finally I added some UI elements so that the player can see what round they are on, their current score and their current weapon upgrades.

This week in class we were introduced to splash damage which was very interesting, we were given a few minutes to try and implement it our selves. My method was on the right track but definitely not functional. The attack we were implementing was a nuke, basically a panic button that would deal damage to any enemies in proximity of the blast, dealing more damage to targets that were closer. This mechanic took up most of the class time because of several bugs and necessary tweaks. In the end I got mine working exactly how I wanted and now I’m curious on how this can be implemented to future projects since splash damage is a very important mechanic in video games. I started adding a new enemy type which would shoot projectiles towards the player which I want to improve on before next week.

For this week I want to add a lot of things, including; difficulty increase per wave, splash damage on the homing missiles, different levels so that I can implement a boss, audio for weapons, explosion effects for enemies and the player, separate upgrades for the laser and missile projectiles to make for a bit more complex weapon selection and also the new enemy type. On top of this there many small changes I want to make for existing functions such as changing the upgrade spawner to drop upgrades depending on the players achievements rather than on a timer which was more complex than I had originally thought as well as general aesthetic elements such as visuals and UI tweaks.  I think I’ve set the scope for this week a bit too much but I’ll try and get most of this done since we are moving on to different projects starting next week. This will most likely become a personal project of mine to continue adding to this SHMUP.

This week we worked on adding homing missiles for the players arsenal as well as giving enemies health values and projectiles damage values so that every attack wasn’t a one shot. The function behind the homing missiles was quite complex and took up a majority of the class. We did a similar function in a previous assessment so it wasn’t that difficult for me to grasp. On top of finding the closest target, the missiles had to lock on. To do this a new quaternion is made in the missile script and it is set to equal the quaternion method called LookRotation which takes a vector3 to look towards. To get the vector3 to look towards we do the missiles position subtracted from the enemies position. After this we set the missiles transform rotation to be a spherical linear interpolation which takes 3 parameters. We parse the missiles rotation, the quaternion that we calculated in the previous line and then the rotation speed multiplied by delta time. Messing around with this projectiles values made for interesting results, changing the rotation speed and adding a rigid body created an entertaining visual to say the least, almost like something out of a psychedelic video game.

Missile guidance functionality

Now that we had multiple weapon types it didn’t make sense that every projectile was a one shot kill so we implemented health values for the enemies. Next was the player weapon damage values which was mostly personal preference, personally I went with 10 damage on the lasers and 25 damage on the missiles. To apply the damage to the target I used a take damage function that is placed on the enemy. When the player projectile hits the enemy, it retrieves its component and calls the take damage function and parses through the damage of the projectile. Now the SHMUP started to feel like a playable game, it provided a challenge with some interesting weapon mechanics. Although the player didn’t have any health values, that’s definitely something I hope to add during the next few weeks.

Before next week I want to tweak the spawner, weapon and movement variables to make the game more aesthetically pleasing and give a more balanced experience. I want to add some game manager elements such as rounds where the enemies difficulty will increase as well as a weapon upgrade system. For the time being I’m keeping the concept for the upgrades simple such as starting out with only the front two muzzles activated at the games start and increasing by two per upgrade pickup.

In our first class of Scripting 2 we started making a SHMUP (Shoot ‘Em Up) game with basic mechanics. This lesson was more of a refresher with similar mechanics to last trimesters work. A shoot ’em up is a typical guns blazing top down or side on view game filled with various weapons, enemy types and power-ups primarily seen in arcades in the early 80’s and 90’s, not to be confused with a First Person Shooter. Here’s a definition from Wikipedia, “Shoot ’em up (also known as shmup or STG) is a subgenre of the shooter genre of video games. In a shoot ’em up, the player character engages in a lone assault, often in a spacecraft or aircraft, shooting large numbers of enemies while dodging their attacks.”

Raiden (Seibu Kaihatsu, 1990)

Some things we added in were player movement, player weapons and enemy movement. I found the player movement quite interesting because we had to set boundaries to keep the player in the visible area. Instead of adding objects around the playable area which the player would collide with, we added two values, one for the X axis and one for the Z axis. If the players transform position goes beyond these values then it will restrict the player from exiting the playable area without using any unnecessary objects. Here’s a print screen on the function:

We also added some player shooting mechanics with inspiration from some popular bullet hell shooters and added six muzzles all at different angles for the full SHMUP experience. For the time being these projectiles just destroy any enemy it touches, which at the time were just some cube game objects tagged as ‘Enemy’. Since these weapons are meant to be lasers they fire at ludicrous speeds which makes for interesting visuals and don’t imitate typical laser behaviour, but it still looks cool.

Now that we had player movement and attacks, we started on the enemy movement which was just some basic forward movement. Then added some spawn locations which would spawn enemies at short intervals above just off the screen, I added three with longer intervals for a more dispersed grouping of enemies. After this we wanted the enemies to actually have some form of AI rather than just passing the player. We made it so that the enemies would rotate towards the player while moving as long as it was in front of the player.