Aloha!
Today we shifted gears in the program and we started on a group project that we plan to the develop over the next 1–2 weeks. We are a team of 6 members who are aiming to make a 2.5 side scrolling arcade shooter in a similar style to the 2D space shooter that most of us have been working on for the the last couple of weeks. The idea behind this project is to work as a team to develop a game with specific prompts to a somewhat larger scale than the solo space shooter project was while also developing team work and organizational skills. Once the project is done we will post the finished game to itch.io, which is a site that hosts smaller indie games.
To start we were provided multiple project options that were different aesthetic styles such as military and sci-fi. We went with the sci-fi setting with one reasoning being that the setting is a bit more flexible with what you can do with it due to its more fantastical aesthetics. Today was mainly working on establishing the foundation for the project such as setting up our Unity projects with the assets provided by Filebase and to also set up our version control repositories using Git and GitHub.
We also spoke about which roles each of us wanted to work on and felt we would be suited to. For me the focus I will be working on for now is developing some of the player controls as well as some of the weapon types. In some of the time that we had between talks I threw together a quick animation for a laser beam attack that I wanted to try and get working that might be interesting to use as either a power weapon for the player or also as an attack for the enemies.
For the graphics I made a laser sprite with a glow effect on it and tested setting up an animation for it that will continue to fire the laser as long as the spacebar is held down and to then play an ending animation once the space bar is released. The intention with this is to build a weapon type that has a charge up time which then fires a sustained laser beam for a couple of seconds after it finishes charging. This can be used as a strong weapon for bosses or to sweep over crowds of enemies. In addition having a sustained line of damage would make for an interesting tool to be used by the enemies to section off parts of the screen to limit the player’s movement, which might be a positive addition to providing variety in the encounter design. One of the major mechanics we are looking at implementing is a health system based on player upgrades. Essentially when the player destroys enemies their weapons will eventually level up but if they take a hit their weapon is demoted one level. If the player takes a hit while being at the very lowest weapon level they will be killed and the game will end. This means we need to come up with a variety of weapon types for the player to build up to and to design a system that allows for that dynamic switching. This part should be fairly manageable as I already had a similar system developed for allowing different powerups to overwrite each other at any point in the Space Shooter Project. Some other ideas that we had to accomplish some weapon variety was adapting mechanics like the homing shot from the Space Shooter project.
Starting tomorrow we get into more involved development now that we have the version control system setup. It will be an intersting challenge as developing in a team setting has its own advantages and difficulties where staying organized and coordinated is one of the toughest parts early on. I am sure that once we get some more time in we will eventually find our stride and be able to develop a project we are happy with. Mahalo for reading and in the meantime why not give the blogs of my teammates a look down below:
Christian: https://aspacio.medium.com/
Ryan: https://rjyamura.medium.com/
Mar: https://mar-mcrae.medium.com/
Dylan: https://dylan-murayama.medium.com/
Chris: https://chrisgamedevhq.medium.com/
For the time being I’ll keep documenting our progress on this blog as per usual. Aloha!
— Kurt
