The Halfway Point
It has been six weeks since I’ve outlined my twelve-week plan in I’m back, and so far things are actually going pretty smoothly.
The goals that I had laid out were as follows:
- Three enemy types
- Procedurally generated dungeon
- Camera movement
- HUD (health, minimap)
- At least one upgrade
- Fully replayable standalone
I’ve started tackling the first three of the six milestones, and thankfully the other three should be easier to accomplish then the first three. I have the kamikaze and basic shooter enemies, and so I’ll need to work on developing the spawner enemy type. I have a Room system, so now I simply need to work out an algorithm that procedurally generates Rooms with various sizes and enemy types in them.
Of course, I still need to think about what sort of upgrades I want to have available to the player, and so I still need to do some designing for that. As for the HUD and making the game a standalone, those tasks should be relatively simple, as they just require adding visual elements such as a health bar, a title, pause, and game over screen, and other little elements for the game.
I also have some bugs and tweaks that I want to address before my twelve weeks are finished:
- Balancing for enemy difficulty
- Increase the actual amount of time spent in each room considerably
- Improve camera movement to avoid showing other Rooms
- Fix the door tile bugs that would trap the player in the doors or lock them out of the room
