Devlog (including proof of concept video) – Feb 3rd 2023

Recent Progress

Since the second Game Jam on January 21st, where we established some core gameplay features – bullets ricocheting off walls, the map being a tight, enclosed space – we have expanded on various features and pulled the game closer to a template to which the core of the final game will probably bear strong similarity.

This post is going to be speaking mostly from a CS/programming perspective, although we've also recently made important clarifications and refinements to what the game's setting and characters will look like. "Dark sci-fi" was always the baseline but now we're leaning into "big robots fighting" as a central guideline. We think the scale implicit in walking through tall buildings and firing huge projectiles will be a fun element.

Kevin started the implementation of a lot of foundational mechanics like movement and hooking up a dynamic control scheme using the Unity Input Manager tool. Sean created the difficult ray-trace bullet path prediction system and improved the code structure by abstracting responsibilities between a game session, player, weapon and bullet. I (Will) worked on smoothing the basic gameplay loop (moving, shooting), added a basic splash damage system, and also did a bunch of code restructuring work along the way. Ziv also made some important contributions, demoing a multiplayer server – simple, quickly made, and it basically works. I will post a video showing that below.

Proof of Concept

Here is a video demonstrating our proof of concept functionality.

This video showcases basic movement, aiming, firing multiple shots (including a sound effect), and the speculative ray-trace. It also shows an early concept level, scattered with obstructing surfaces which would be easy to reflect your shots off of. 

(Two players in the arena together; each with their own projectiles and ray-traces)

Extra: showing the multiplayer server working between two instances of the game. We will still focus on local multiplayer but the framework is there for expanding if we think it would be worthwhile.

We will keep working hard in the coming weeks!