dev log 02 - building weapons

tools of destruction...?

With a lot of the backend out of the way, I've spent a bit of time making weapons.

At this stage, I want to keep things fairly simple whilst I iron-out the basic gunplay - then I can layer on the crazy once I'm happy with how things feel.

So far I have

A grenade

revolver

minigun

shotgun

railgun

and a rocket launcher.

They're all made using a bunch of placeholder assets to save on time, but once I'm happy with the roster I'll go back and implement them proper.

Building each of these has been an interesting process - pretty much all of them made me re-assess how I create assets for the game in some way.

For example, the shotgun caused me to rebuild the state-machines that I use to control the behaviour of each weapon.

Another rework came from the minigun, which made me change how status effects are applied to the player (the minigun slows you down when firing) and I also added FMOD to the project to better handle the audio.

the learning journey

The biggest takeaway that I've had over the last week or so of development has been that I am waaaay too eager to try and find the 'proper' solution to any problem I'm facing. What I need to try and do more is settle for 'good enough'.

My perfectionism gets the best of me, and I waste time. I've been making a concious effort recently to cut corners here and get something done and working - the last thing I want is this project taking another 5 years to get into any semblance of a playable state.

what next?

Although I still have a few things I want to chase up, my next job is to test how things are so far - I don't want to commit too hard to this if the gameplay is super buggy or isn't fun. I'll probably throw together a few small levels and then round up some close friends and run some test games.

I'll check back in here once I've made some levels to playtest on

Ciao!