I may have gotten carried away...
I may have gotten carried away… I was working on my 2D adventure game, reminiscent of Hyper Light Drifter, when I started working on enemy behavior. Figuring out how I wanted them to work was a little difficult, so I decided to open a new Unity project to prototype some ai without needing to worry about sprites or animations. Well, I may have gone a little overboard with that. I got movement working really quickly, but I also wanted to work on a spreadsheet to simulate balancing within the game. Let me take you back about 6 or so months ago. I was working on a 2D space shooter, similar to what you would find in an arcade from the 80’s. I had everything working on the project but got lost when it came to why I was actually working on that project. It was fun and I learned a lot about programming patterns, spawning waves of ships at different locations at different times, and understanding Unity’s new input system. It was a decent step in prototyping an arcade feel, but I lost what I truly wanted the game to feel like, so I slowly stopped working on it. Fast forward to the current time and I have an AI shooter simulation that is eerily reminiscent of that 80’s arcade shooter. I’ve started to learn about importing data from spreadsheets so I can easily manipulate values from a spreadsheet and see them immediately within the game. The biggest challenge I’ve faced so far is still balancing with the new detection field of view that I’ve created for each ship. Whenever a new ship spawns up, it grabs a random stat list for its ship and a random stat list for the weapon it has. This provides a lot of interesting scenarios just from it randomly grabbing their stats. This affects the detection zones too, as sometimes they are larger or smaller and can have a bigger effect based on the combination of ship and weapon they get. I am happy with where I am in this project with the challenges that I have faced, and I hope to show you more about it in the coming weeks!