The combat system I’ve designed and started implementing for Belly of the Beast has its inspiration in bullet hell shoot-em ups. I like the idea of avoiding a huge number of projectiles that are moving in interesting ways being the focus of combat. The benefits of this design decision are several; It cuts back on the amount of AI coding I have to do in favor of more script-able “patterns”. The Focus on projectile avoidance plays into the existing movement mechanics as well, teleport dashing, and double jumping are helpful in avoiding these projectiles. Additionally Airslam now propels projectiles away from you.
As I was testing this new iteration I found that the grenade only exploding on impact made it very hard to deal with the sometimes worrisome number of bullets the turrets were spawning at me. So I built a mine function; left clicking now launches a remotely detonate-able bomb. Right now its just the same damage numbers as the regular grenade function.
Actually on the topic of Grenades, I finally got around to creating a grenade swapping system and better handling the Grenades in an easily extendable way; so new development will
On top of that I also began figuring how I was going to limit the players considerable firepower. In other words, a reloading system. Although technically its not really a loading system at all; its a charge system. Not charge as in Samus Charge beam (though that might be worth investigating); basically you have a certain amount of energy, and each grenade consumes a certain amount of that. You very slowly gain charge back naturally, but it also has a chance to spawn when you get hit and are below 50% health. If you are at absolute 0 you can reload one grenades worth of energy by slamming, as long as you currently have less than enough ammo to fire a grenade. This isn’t fully implemented yet, I hope to get it in this next sprint.
There are several significant bugs and the room that I set up for testing was poorly laid out; but despite these things the test went moderately well.
Thats it for this weeks update. Sorry It was so late
Senior Year Dev Blog 