GGO17 - Day 18

This update is a bit late due to an unplanned CS: GO game followed by an unplanned “just one more ticket” after that (it was about 23:00 or 23:30 when the match ended).

I have had an amazingly productive Saturday!

I started working on the ticket to turn enemy soldiers into a plausible threat to the player’s bunker. The first step (or so I thought at the time), was to start animating the soldiers so they can walk towards the bunker instead of sliding towards it:

I got about halfway into a walk animation when I realised that an hour and a half was gone and I was only halfway there… So after a bit of coffee and some thinking, I decided that this was polish that I can put off until later.

So I shifted focus to how I could make the soldiers a threat with the minimum of art effort involved. I hit upon the idea of them charging the bunker and attacking the inhabitants in melee when they got close - I could represent the melee with a simple dust cloud animation, while giving the mechanic some depth with the game logic. It takes into account who is in the bunker and how far they are likely to be from the entrance when allocating damage, so effectively your gunner and commander will be the last ones to die, while guards tend to go first.

The dust cloud started out static, but after a few hours break for a movie it dawned on me that it won’t actually take that much code to animate it, so I quickly tackled that as well:

The last thing I tackled was adding a particle effect when things die:

The rest of today is going to be positively boring by comparison as the main priorities remaining to make a complete game now are menu screens (the flak I’m leaving for Sas as it dovetails a bit with the stuff he’s building for the Bombers ticket):