#tytans2

[streuscode]

Oi, you there!  Yea, you!  Lemme talk at you for abit.

As you can see above, I added the Arc ability.  Now, you may be thinking “Why, Streus, that’s just a lazy teleport!”, and you’d be right.  Well, it can’t teleport over walls, so it’s not completely lazy.  It also damages enemies caught between the start and end points; so that’s nifty.  Arc isn’t completely done yet, though.  I’d like to add some VFX between the start and endpoints, and I need to tweak the collision detection a little, but it’s all good.

On the UI front, I spent a whole 10 minutes updating the UI for ability charges so that it wasn’t just a number overlaid on the ability icon

And I gave the health bar a simple little low health animation.

And the energy heat bar got a little gradient that I may or may not keep.

Hold up.  Heat?

Yup.  Most of this past week was focused on redesigning the energy/mana pool system into something that fit Tytans II better.  Heat is what I came up with.  Instead of passively building energy to spend on abilities, players will start with an empty pool of heat that will build as they use abilities.  Heat will decay passively, but players can also discharge heat by using their basic attack.  Exceeding the heat limit incurs...some kind of penalty.  I’m still mulling over what exactly the penalty should be, but I’m pretty sure I’ll be going with some kind of damage infliction.  Could be straight damage equal to the exceeded amount (heat - heatMax); could be a damage over time status effect with the same value; could be a movement penalty.  The possibilities are endless.  Mostly endless.  Pretty endless.  More endless than not.

Other things will probably demand my attention this coming week, so next week’s post shouldn’t be anything too substantial.

Until then!

[streuscode]

Happiest of Mondays, everyone!  Good holidays?  Good.  Let’s get into it.

Like I said last Monday, I took this week off, but I still spent a little time thinking about what I’d like to get into this week.  Part of that was just implementing Charge, Trap, and Arc (which I started on today; Charge can be seen above), and part was redesigning some clunkier parts of Tytans II.

This post ended up actually being pretty lengthy, so if you want details...

Lots of bits of the original Tytans found its way into my current project because I wanted a quick and easy base to start off with, seeing as this is my first solo project in Unity (and the longest running so far).  As I’ve said many times, there’s so much wrong with the design of Tytans, and it’s taken this replotting of the path I took in developing it for me to pick out all of the mistakes I made.

And as I’ve been playtesting Tytans II, I’ve come to conclusion that the movement style it inherited from its predecessor is pretty wank.  For those that don’t scour and catalog every sentence I throw up on here, the movement style for Tytans and Tytans II is a simple WASD configuration with the player locked to face the mouse position.  W moves the player to the mouse, A strafes left, etc.  I thought this style would allow for lots of dynamic circling, strafing, dodging.  In the end, it encourages a very static playstyle.  One where the player keeps whatever they’re shooting at more or less above them on the screen so that their axes of movement don’t flip (A goes right, D left, etc).  If the camera rotation was locked to the player’s rotation, it might work...

Instead of going further off the rails in an attempt to salvage a mechanic that more or less just made me feel uncomfortable when playing, I opted for a classic 8-directional WASD setup (as can be seen above).  It’s familiar, and it’s flexible enough.

The other change I’ve been considering, but not yet implemented, has to do with energy.  Tytans II‘s energy system is the classic mana-type deal.  Player has limited resource pool.  Player spends resource to use abilities.  If player doesn’t have enough resource for ability, player cannot use ability.  There’s nothing wrong with having a “mana” pool or resource bars, so long as they fit the pace of the gameplay.  As I see it, the kind of mana-pool system Tytans II has at the mo is better suited for a slower paced game.  I’m not going to go any further explanation-wise, because I feel like I could write up a whole post on game pace and resource pools.  Suffice to say, the current energy system is getting a rehaul this week.

I’ll talk about it, and the changes I will have made, next week.

Until then!

[streuscode]

I don’t feel like writing this post, but I’m doing it anyway!  Uh, I mean...  Happy Monday, everybody!

Prometheus got even more work this week.  I fixed up my distribution algorithm (it was quite buggy) and I settled on attack patterns (two displayed above) for him.  He and his minions are pretty much complete; however, I can’ t help but feel like they’re lacking something.  I’ll probably revisit him after I’ve done one or two more bosses, but for now I’m giving him the back burner treatment because I’m just so goddamn tired of working on the same fight.

I’m just going to add in his ability drops and call it a day 2-3 weeks.  At least I’m happy with the icons for his dropped abilities.

Charge, Arc, and Trap, respectively.

I’ll try to get some work done on those abilities and get started on Helios this week, but I really can’t promise much.

Till next time, amigos!

[streuscode]

Happy Monday, everybody!

This is going to be a long post, in which I’ll cover difficulty, re-balancing, AI, algorithms, geometry, and I’ll say the word “tacos” once.

Ready?  Let’s dive in!

So, what you see above is a taste of how I plan to tackle the three levels of difficulty in Tytans II.  In Tytans, I handled difficulty very naively.  I basically just treated each difficulty as a multiplier for boss health and damage.  The result was slow, unforgiving gameplay on the higher difficulties.  For Tytans II I settled on something very different.  The difficulties still are, in essence, multipliers; however, they affect very different values.  In the case of Themis, this means increasing the number of “Sword of Truth”s she shoots at a time, and decreasing the interval between her first and second volleys.  I plan on adopting similar, but not identical schemes for difficulty for the other bosses.

As a side note, both last and this week I’ve been tweaking the classes a bit.  I nerfed the Defender’s shield ability a bit, and gave the Obliterator a new primary fire.

This sums up what the bulk of my dev time in the past week was focused on.  Mother.  Fuckin’.  Minion formations.  Now almost nothing else in Prometheus’s fight is finished, so ignore everything that isn’t the minons’ movement.

When I started thinking about this fight, I thought I was going to have to build some complex AI to make the fight interesting (read: not a clusterfuck of minions doing whatever).  As I thought more about what I wanted the fight to be like, though, I realized something fundamental about my approach to Tytans II.  Pattern and rhythm.  Playing Tytans II isn’t about fighting some super intelligent opponent that can easily outsmart you; rather, it’s focused on small sets of predictable behaviors working in tandem to present a challenge.

And so I thought, why not just make Prometheus a kind of conductor, guiding a group of musicians through a piece of music?  So I set to work on making a class that could create a pattern of n minions given a shape defined by an array of vertices.  Specifically, I focused on distributing n objects over a series of line segments.

Aaaand here’s the code to do that (obviously there’s a lot more code than this, but this is the important bit) (and yes, I’m sure there’s a way to make this way more efficient).  Distributing n objects over a single line is easy; the real challenge of this algorithm was accounting for reaching the end of a line and continuing on to the next one.  (If there’s enough interest, I may create a separate post explaining the whole idea.)

I initially planned on including a filled polygon case, as well as cases for ellipses (and therefore, circles), but I’ve spent enough time on Prometheus as is, and I need to finish him up and move on to Helios.  Maybe he’ll be done by next week.  Maybe.

Anyway, thanks for reading through this post!  It didn’t end up a long as I thought it would.  Must less space to build suspense for the tacos gag.  Ah well.

Until next week!

[streuscode]

Happy Monday, uh....people!  Damn.  I had a good start, and I instantly ruined it.  Whatever.  Let’s get into the stuff.

Above is actually the last thing I worked on this week.  Simply put, they’re little homing, healing bullets.  Really, though, they required I buff up my bullet system a bit to handle “damage <= 0″ cases.  Not a lot of buff.  Just a little.  These homing health bullets will be used in the next next boss fight I’m working on, the first of the T2 bosses, Prometheus.  I set up this whole shoot-health-pickups-to-release-their-health thing as a way to test the bullet.  I may or may not keep the feature (it’s cool, but a bit imbalanced).

Before I started on this, I set up a new hierarchy for “Control Scripts”.  Enemy control scripts and the player control script required very similar functionality, so I stuck them under the same parent class and started fleshing out support methods.  Doing so broke pausing a bit, but not majorly, so I’m letting it slide for the time being.  “I’ll get to it.”

I also added a stacking status effect subclass with support for sequential and concurrent decay (basically, when the duration ends, either remove one stack, or all of them).  I’m not super happy with it yet, but then again, I don’t need it yet, so I’m giving it the same treatment as pausing.

And, like I said, I’ve been working on Prometheus.  Design-wise he’s pretty much complete.  There are a few things I decided to figure out during implementation, which is crawling along.  Prometheus is a much more complex boss than Themis, and I’m going to have to spend a larger chunk of time on AI compared to Themis.  It’ll be worth it though.  I’m very much looking forward to seeing how Prometheus turns out.

Prometheus himself may not be in the next update, but there’ll be plenty of support content to show off by next Monday.

Until then!

[streuscode]

What I worked on this week can’t really be easily shown with pictures, unless I posted straight up code.  Then again, not even the code is interesting in and of itself.  Anyway, that’s why you’re getting this flag.

I spent this week a) refactoring, b) thinking over balance and changes to make, or not make, in order to rebalance, and c) adding functionality to existing systems for later content.

The refactoring was mainly centered around the bullet system.  In a prior post I mentioned that the bullet system, specifically when it came to different behaviors for different bullet types, was “limited and clunky” (a vast understatement).  Well, I finally got around to fixing that.  The original system could be summed up with “switch-cases and an enum”.  The new one does reasonable stuff.  With child classes n’ stuff.

A little refactoring went into the ability system as well, but only as facilitation for new functionality: charges.  Basically, now an ability can accrue charges that can be used in lieu of resetting the cooldown of the ability.  I still need to test the new system a little, but so far it seems solid.  I also need to add UI support for displaying charges.

And then there was all the balance stuff.  I’ve come to the conclusion that the Defender just needs some value tweaking (I’m not sure where yet.  Probably in multiple places), and the Obliterator needs a revamped primary fire.  Right now the Obliterator’s primary is just a basic shot with a x2 damage multiplier which applies knockback to the player.  It’s not fun to use, and it’s extremely weak in comparison to the other two classes’ primaries.  I’m mulling over a few new versions.  Some include applying buffs for remaining in place; some include applying buffs for firing infrequently,  With the new charge-able ability system, I have quite a few more options.

This coming week I’d like to focus on that as well as adding stacking to status effects (a special case, not a general rule), adding a new child class to Ability called MinionAbility, and perhaps tackling/preparing to tackle an actual “control script” framework for my Entity system.

If I don’t stop myself now, I’ll just keep rambling.  Until next time!

[streuscode]

(acknowledgment of late post)

Oh, hey, who’s that?  Is that Themis?  Well, yea, obviously.  Just look at that health bar, it’s got her name and everything.

Yep, Themis is the first boss of Tytans II.  Yes, the name is that of the Greek titan Themis of divine law, order, and all that.  The two share nothing beyond a name and the theme of law and balance.  Themis, the boss, is mostly finished, as are the features unique to bosses (the boss health bar, door opening/closing on fight beginning/ending, etc).  Her movement still needs work (she needs to change her strafe direction when she hits a wall), and I’m still messing around with her abilities and patterns to make the fight fun and challenging, but not too challenging.

For details...

For example, the two status effects she applies, Innocent, and Guilty, need a lot of balance.  As they are, Innocent is a minor health/energy regen buff, and Guilty is an armor decrease (which just introduces a flat increase in damage taken).  The two are also mutually exclusive.  Innocent will remove Guilty and vice versa.  Guilty seems fine as is, but lacks a certain uniqueness that separates it from any old armor debuff.  Innocent suffers from the same problem (non-uniqueness) with the addition of being really difficult to balance correctly.

Two of Themis’s abilities are based around deterring the player from sitting too close (one applies statuses applied to Themis to the player, and the other traps the player for a few seconds).  Neither of these really deter any of the classes, except the Obliterator.  The Skirmisher can dash out of the trap (which is, admittedly, cool).  The Defender can soak up all the damage taken while trapped with its shield.  Oh, and the status sharing ability only affects the Obliterator and those who use the Plasma bullet type.  I’m thinking over a fix for the status sharing ability, but the trap will be tougher to fix.

And to continue on the classes: the Defender vastly overpowers the other two classes right now, and I’m not sure if simple value adjusting will rebalance it. The Obliterator, on the other hand, could probably be buffed without changing it too drastically.

In short: I have a lot of balancing and readjusting to get through.  I don’t think I’ll release anything for playtesting until I’m happy with the balance.

Yes, that is me pushing off a playtest release again.  Deal with it.

Until next time!

[streuscode]

Remember what I said about hoping to get a playtesting version ready for today?  Well, that didn’t pan out.  I poured a bunch of dev hours into Tytans II this week, but not nearly enough to push out the first boss today.  That said, I’m definitely close to being ready.

I started off the week by getting player death/respawning working (pictured above).  Not a difficult feature, but certainly a very important one.

Speaking of important, I also got a basic tutorial into the game.  It’s nothing special; it’s just a walkthrough of the controls and an explanation of the “inventory” n’ such.  Then it punts you off into the game.  

That’s it for major features.  Everything else I worked on is related to the first boss, and I don’t want to talk about her until she’s completed.

Well, no, I did add Berzerk, which is a status effect (applied by an ability) that increases damage dealt and taken the lower your health.  There’re Shock and Slow status effects now as well.  That’s about it though.

Yup.  Considering how much work I did, I don’t really have much to talk about.  

Anyway, next post I’ll have all the first boss content to go over, as well as the playtest build.  I might even preview the second boss.

We’ll see.  Until next time!