Devlog 7 - The Price Of Freedom and Living

Day 7

I'm trying to be a bit quicker with developing the game, so this devlog may be shorter compared to normal because I'm running out of time! Anyway here's the summary of what I did today:

• Added 2X icon (Power Up)
• Added three perks which all work
• Added power up indicators
• Added doors, and accidently, the price of freedom, the subtheme.
• Changed how HP bar was positioned due to bugs with the Tank perk
• Added a temporary boost to score at the start of games (For testing purposes only)

Right well first thing I worked on was the 2X icon. I knew it would be simple as I just had to add the text so I created a text and made it do everything from scale to position of the actual icon. Then I began work on perks. Basically I used the buyable code to buy the perks and if a perk existed, the icon, it would do whatever its meant to do. For example "Tank" increases your maximum HP by increasing your HP bar until its 1.5x scale. This provides a nice smooth upgrade however it causes some problems with the position code as I originally set the HP bar to 90 degrees so it kept going to the wrong places when increasing the scale. Eventually I managed to make it less obvious and annoying this movement, but it still exists.

Next I worked on “Fast Reloads”, basically what it says. Its a perk that speeds up reloads by double by halfing the time needed to reload. After that I worked on “Fast Lover” which is meant to be a pun based off the theme where you can shoot more quickly. To do this I just divided the fire rate by 2.2 when Fast Lover is active and it works. Overall these three perks make a massive difference in difficulty when I was testing the game, making it much more easy to kill the robots before the respawned and overwhelmed although I think health regeneration and player damage may need to be tweaked a small bit.

Afterwards, I decided to add power up indicators, showing how long was left before Bug or 2X ran out. I created two small icons and added them to the GUI and as the timer for those power ups gets smaller, their opacities decrease until it reaches 0 where it stays transparent. It’s not as good as flashing the power up at the end as it can be a little unclear at low opacities, however this was quicker to add and right now, time is more important as I don’t have a lot left to use to develop this game.

Next I added doors. I decided to create an object 1 by 3 blocks long so enemies can walk through it. Then I made it an obstacle for path finding and a static physics object so the player can’t go through it. After that I added the buyable code to it so players can buy the door to open it. This causes the door to be deleted and as a result, let’s the player enter the next area. However because of my testing map so far only has two rooms and I added the door to the outer wall, the player can now literally escape. Paying for their freedom which is the sub theme “The Price of Freedom”.

Additionally I changed the starting score to 50500 at the start of games in order to quickly test doors and perks so I don’t have to go around killing robots. Thanks for reading.