This month, I spent most of my coding time with more exercises and review. I feel more confident when it comes to creating my own functions and using them. I learned how to call functions from across different scripts I’ve made in Unity, which is absolutely required for making anything.
Here’s everything I did when I worked on PIT through the month of October:
As you can see, the guard can move now! He doesn’t do any damage just yet. This was quite easy to program, as he just follows the player along the X axis.
I also added that little punch attack for the player. This took me a very long time to figure out. I had no problem adding the “hitbox” area using DrawCircle. Actually applying damage to the enemy was tough, but once I learned more about creating and calling methods, I was able to figure it out with little tutorial help. For some reason though, adding knockback was the hardest part. I was definitely overthinking it. All I had to do was create an ApplyForce method for each direction, which activate depending on which way the enemy is facing.
Anyway, I want the punch to barely damage enemies. It’s possible to kill by punching, but the range is terrible and you most likely will take a hit. I plan to have multiple weapon types, hopefully about three. I was thinking:
- Punch – minimum damage, minimum range
- Sword – medium damage, medium range
- Spear – low damage, high range
- Hammer – high damage, low range
I’m on my way to having a working combat system! I’m still really excited for this project and it’s already come farther than I thought I could take it. There have been times where I think I need to go even smaller for my first game, but why not challenge myself?
Speaking of challenging myself, I’d like to get better at pixel art. So today, I spent many hours drawing in Aseprite. When animating my player sprite, I was frustated with the tiny amount of pixels I had to work with. The animations of my game are not gonna be smooth if the characters look this tiny. So, I knew that eventually I’d have to remake all the art in my game.
Well, I was tired of looking at that little Atari-era pixel dude, and I made a brand new player sprite. I loved how it came out, so I got excited and drew the game’s first demon as well:
PIT is no longer a 1-bit game. I’ll be using these gray colors to simulate depth. This isn’t exactly what I should be spending time on right now, but I couldn’t look at those placeholder characters anymore. I’d like to have a little demo of the game eventually, so I needed some better art. I love this style and I think it leaves room for more clear and distinct animations.
I haven’t put them into Unity just yet, and I probably won’t until I create full sprite sheets for them.
THOMAS MAZZAFERRO 