Gamieon

This is the follow-up to Desura.com. If this is your first time ever reading about "Paper Cowboys," please read the preface in the first article.

How it looks after 24 total hours of development

Hour 17

Good progress in this hour. I made the enemies aim toward the closest player, fixed the ledge jumping, increased gravity, made enemy bullets slower, fixed the bug where the buildings were not scrolling as fast as the player, and added enemies throughout the map.

I also started on the fun stuff: Options menu (player name, color, volume controls), scoring; and after those are done...ITEM DROPS! Sound effects will come later.

Hour 18

Got the options menu finished (name, color, sfx volume, music volume), and moved the active game list into its own menu so it wouldn't fight the other buttons for space. I also looked up how to send player properties (such as color) to other players and was in the middle of writing code to do that when my hour expired. I think the main menu won't go through many more changes before time expires.

Hour 19

I finished getting the player attributes to sync with all players, as well as scoring to work (which was rather tricky). I then tried a two-player playthrough (where one player just stands there doing nothing) and experienced some oddities where, sometimes after shooting an enemy, several warnings would appear in my Console window suggesting child objects of the enemy would be missing. There's also a problem where a new player will never spawn if the master player is dead at the time.

As badly as I want to work on adding drops and new weapons, I spent the rest of the hour investigating these bugs which still remain unsolved.

Hour 20

I believe the errors from the previous hour are now fixed; it was a combination of the barrel trying to act like an animated character, and all the players trying to control everyone elses bullets. Like I mentioned before, you have to think carefully about what your game components do in a networked environment! Now I can begin adding new weapons and limiting the rate of fire for the existing one.

I also pondered the enemy behavior a little more; and if I have time, I may change the enemy dynamics to what I call the "whack-a-mole" model.

Right now I make just one enemy appear at each spawn point as soon as it comes into screen range. Players can therefore advance through the game by incessantly shooting in the forward direction since their bullets will inevitably strike an enemy shortly after they appear on screen.

With whack-a-mole, there will be pre-defined indestructable spawn points where an endless (or limited depending on the setup) slow stream of enemies will come out at random times to fire on players. Enemies may also partially come out just to trick a player into shooting at them, and then wait until the player finally stops before they come out to fire back.

The advantage of whack-a-mole is that a stream of enemies can come from all corners of the screen, and that requires players to be more evasive and coordinated.

Of course this is all just thinking out loud; I need to start working on new weapons now. I'll go back to the enemy design later on after I do some playthrough testing.

Hour 21

I burned through the first 20 minutes fixing some earlier bugs that I discovered while thinking about the project as I fell asleep the night before. I also managed to get two new weapons fully functional:

- The Winchesta: Fires armor piercing (it won't disappear when it hits something) bullets that do 1.5x damage. No, it's not a Winchester....it's THE WINCHESTA!

- The Shotgun: Fires four shells that do 2x damage at a time with a reduced range.

And I drew up another weapon that isn't yet functional:

- The Rocket Launcher: Because I said so.

In the next hour I need to control the rates of fire, create ammo limits for non-pistol weapons, finish the rocket launcher; and make a weapon selection HUD that shows your weapons and ammo and your weapon hotkeys. If I have time, I'll do more network testing followed by starting on random weapon and ammo drops.

Hour 22

Well I refactored the player weapon class hierarchy a bit, put a limit on rate of fire, ammo, and threw together a HUD that lets you choose weapons (just barely in the nick of time). I also got the startings of the rocket launcher, but it's not done. I pretty much have two hours left to get the rocket launcher working, weapon drops, and a level 1 boss. I'm pretty sure that's not going to happen, so I need to prioritize:

I'll finish the boss, and then the rocket launcher.

Hour 23

I totally don't know where the time went. I did a little bit of refactoring, made it so you can't go past the end of the level, added gizmos so you could see the start and end points in the Unity editor, worked on the boss...and before I knew it, an hour had passed! This is it...I've got one more hour to go before the half-way point...can I get the boss done in time?

Hour 24

I finished the boss, got the rocket launcher rockets to unleash some smoke particles and got some play testing in with a good friend of mine who goes by the alias NullSoldier. I consider the test successful because the player elements kept in sync and the network-related bugs should be easy to fix. I uploaded the video to YouTube.

Plan for the next 24 hours

I'm at the half-way point, so I decided to sit back and assess things.

Features I wanted to get done by now:
- Rocket launcher. It can fire rockets; but they don't explode, have smoke trails, or shake the camera yet.
- Item drops including weapons, hats, ammo, belts for increased capacity, and cigarettes for fun.

Remaining bugs I wanted to fix:
- If a player leaves and rejoins, then all the spawn points respawn enemies!
- If you play from Chrome, keyboard inputs may get ignored (it happened to NullSoldier; I couldn't duplicate it)
- Barrels don't fall in sync between players
- Sometimes you cease to be able to jump
- When your friend dies, they don't get thrown in a direction like enemies do
- No Music for level 1
- "Respawning in" should be your player color, not black
- Too much GUI screen clutter in boss fights; you can hardly even see the boss
- The horses in the title screen don't have tails

Remaining features I need to do:
- Physics! I noticed while testing that fun with physics could be an untapped gold mine for this game...for example maybe a player could shoot a support pole that falls and unleashes a bunch of falling barrels; or maybe rocket-shoot a floor and the enemies on it all fall down.
- Item drops including weapons, hats, ammo, belts for increased capacity, and cigarettes for fun.
- There needs to be explosions and fanfare when you beat a boss
- There needs to be a visual cue that shows you when you can jump
- More weapons (maybe a flamethrower if I have time)
- Hats and scarves
- Sound effects
- "Whack-a-mole" enemies
- Two more levels; one of them on horseback
- Weapon display at the top and score list needs cleanup
- Player hues need to be a little darker; it's hard to see certain colors.

Check out my homepage and news feeds