Twilight Tower Defense Open Development - Week #8
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Howdy!
Sorry this email was supposed to be sent yesterday but I wanted to squeeze in some features into the weekly build. I hope that you've had a nice week. My week has been a little bit more fragmented than I wished but I managed to get a lot of things done.
As always if you like this game and the concept head over to the Discord Server and give me a hand with features, feedback and ideas that I can add to the game.
What have I been up to this week?
This week the focus has been to create more variation in enemies and I really wanted to get a enemy with a long range weapon. So I came up a skeleton archer, read the story about it below.
I also created a Discord bot for the Discord server, currently it doesn't do that much but I hope to build some mini-game into it. There is a new version that you can play on itch.
Skeleton archer
To make it easier for me to handle various weapons in the game I figured that the it would be great if the AI player could use the same weapons as the player. To avoid having to create a gazillion animations I tried a system where I create the a weapon as a separate object which can be carried by the player or an AI enemy. But the process took a bit of time, just giving the AI a bow didn't have the effect I plane. At first the AI tried to use it as a sword, which sort of works actually so that is now a feature when they run out of arrows.
2nd attempt went a bit better but still had some issues with the AI killing itself.
After a number of attempts it started to act the way I had envisioned it.
Aiming
Having an AI archer also meant that I need to figure out how to aim and spent a fair time reading about ballistics and how I would be able to calculate a trajectory. I felt like I was about to drown in the deep-end of the pool but then I found this article which explains how to that in various ways and included source code to a sample.
Bow Towers
Well now that I had an AI that could carry a bow I could easily duplicate the same mechanism for a turret.
Detailed change log
v0.1.7
* New Enemy: Skeleton archer.
* New Test Level: Two Towers are already built for you on this map.
* New Tower: Bow Tower that can aim & fire bow.
* New feature: Added SFX when zombies gets into the house, like mmmm brains.
* New feature: Added shake effect on door and turrets when Zombies hit them;
* New feature: Added SFX baning sound when Zombie hits turret or door.
* New feature: Added SFX screaming when Zombie enters house.
* Improved: Only allow enemies to enter house while they are on ground.
* Improved: When placing towers all sprites get 0.5 in alpha value so you can see through the whole turret.
* Improved: Created general shader & material to make a sprite go white, this makes the process when hitting something much easier to handle instead of a material per sprite.
* Fixed Bug: Enemies turn around when they encounter a door at times.
* Fixed bug: Enemies won't hit towers if they are too thick.
TRAC -> TAR (Total Arcade Racing)
Ok so TRAC doesn't compute to Totally Rad Arcade Racing, not sure what I was thinking about so there is a new name for it and you can try the first version on itch already!
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