Devlog 5 - Compete for score!

Day 5

Hello again to another devlog, today I did the following:

• Added a score counter - inspired by COD Zombies mode
• Can now gain score from killing robots or just harming them
• Health Regen!
• Reload indicator to show how long it will take to finish reloading
• AI changed again - Will only shoot if your within its sight
• AI - Lasers shoot from the laser spot on them
• AI - Less of them at one time to improve performance (Maximum of 6 now which is a lot smoother)
• Two new weapons - A weapon reveal further down the devlog!
• Fixed a weapon change bug so now all 9 slots can be accessed.
• Made HP and Ammo bars smaller.

Well first things first, I think I should show what I've done so here's a screenshot, with Activate Windows watermark included because why not?

In this screenshot, the new reload indicator, the score counter, the smaller HP / ammo bars and a weapon can be seen in the picture.

First I worked on the score counter, it was fairly simple just added a sprite for the background, stuck some text on the sprite and changed the text of the text to match the variable of score. However then I went onto actually gaining score which meant going through all of my code, which luckily I've grouped but unluckily not commented on so it was easier and harder to find the code to edit in some ways, and then adjusting the player collision code with lasers. After a few goes, I finally got it working and not constantly increasing like it did at first.

Afterwards, I worked on health regeneration. This was done by tracking when the player takes damage, and if that value is X seconds less then the current time, start adding health. I had to keep redoing this because it either felt too long or too quick but eventually I got 6 seconds as a good delay. 

Then I went onto AI, so I added a check to see if the player is within 90 degrees left or right of the robots front and if they aren't, they wont shoot and will actually go to their green light state which means they cant see the player but will still try to look for them, although they will still turn around to face them so they will eventually hunt the player down. Because performance was getting a bit annoying, I've temporarily reduced the spawn limit on robots to 6 so a stable 60 FPS can be achieved.

Another thing I did was add a reload indicator which shows how close the player is to finish reloading. I did this by making a box that constantly fills a outlined area and will increase at the rate of reload speed. This should help the player enjoy the game a lot more.

Additionally I added two new guns, which I looked for a lot of ideas online but eventually took some inspiration from https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/rifle-names.php to get two gun names, which I wont reveal yet. Finally I also reduced the health and ammo bars to make them not look too big.