This month has been crazy for me. Work was busy, Home life was, and I’ve been doing a bunch of random stuff after I’m done with work while the kids sleep.
In the last month, I finished a decent feature at work, discovered randomizers, had a sick family, made significant headway in my game dev, and I did my first speedrun with Mr. Bond (profile | video). With all of this going on, it has been extremely stressful in our house.
The game I’m working on is a twin-stick shooter. I’ve been having a lot of fun with it. Luckily, I’ve structured the code in a way that bringing in new enemy types is fairly easy.
All of my enemies use the IEnemy interface. The base implementation of the interface is abstract and contains the core common logic of all enemies, and its children contain the specifics.
Using this interface allows me to easily create an enemy factory that will create the requested type of IEnemy. The factory also has a pointer to the main game’s content, which is then used when actually instantiating the concrete implementation of the interface.
After that though, I found myself staring into the abyss. “Where do I go from here? What’s actually going to be fun? What exactly do I want make this game into?”
My current answer is I don’t know. At this point, I just want to finish a game. I’ve changed the design in my mind so many times already. I think what I’ve largely settled on, is that I’m spawning enemies and I’m going to work on player controls.
The controls are the player’s gateway to my game world. I want it to feel naturally, intuitive, and comfortable. Anyone who has ever dealt with UX (User Experience) knows how difficult this is. I like so far where the controls are at, so now I’m starting to add other aspects, like different kinds of enemies and weapons.
I can quickly prototype and see what feels good and provides a challenge to the player. I can easily make adjustments to weapons. I can change the number of bullets and spread. I can change the rate of fire and the recoil. It’s actually fun to tinker with. It is also strangely satisfying to shoot a shotgun that I created in code to blast a bunch of enemies.
As I go further, I’ll let you know more. I haven’t been streaming this because it’s been so inconsistent. I’m hoping to get to the point where I have a testable prototype!
