Devlog week 01 - Player's Weapon Movement

Week 01 - Player's Weapon Movement

In this week project's update, the fundamental things to work properly are player's weapon movement and ensuring each player has one turn to attack every time.
This is the backbone of the game, which is Player 1 (Pooch)  throws bone to Player 2 (Roo) to reduce opponent's health when it hits (and vice versa), the game ends when one of the character's health (roo or pooch) runs out.

Controls are coded as follow:

• To throw the weapon: Left-click mouse.

• To control the strength of throwing power: hold the left-click mouse then release to launch the attack. The longer you hold, the stronger of the power will be (capped at 2 seconds for max strength).

There are three things that are important in making this movement work.  First, writing code to manage which player's turn to attack, where first turn is always Pooch, then once weapon (spawn in every turn) has been thrown, it will be automatically Roo's turn, etc. Second, I need to ensure the codes able to recognise when the player clicks the mouse on the the character, it will trigger the character to throw the correct weapon, with additional feature to control the power of throw. And last but not least, is to make the weapon's movement itself launch toward the opponent direction in parabolic way just like we throw things in real life (or shooting ball in basketball game), then disappear once it hits something (opponent, ground, fence, etc).

These are some gif images of the achieved progress so far:

Result of each character throwing with minimum power.

Result of each character throwing with maximum power.

Player will need to find sweet spot to headshot the opponent.

And of course, this result was not achieved in one try. Here are some captured game-gone-wrong moments while trying to achieve the wanted result:

pooch flew to the moon along with the bone like inseparable lovey-dovey couple.

When game started, somehow Pooch kind of floats in the air. Then when the attack successful, Roo is being a chicken and retreat to the bush.

This time, when Roo's attack successful, Pooch the one being a scaredy-cat and retreat to the safety.
(of course we need them to keep fighting to determine the winner)

The above problem's resolved by distinguish the layer between each object, ensuring gravity applied to the weapon and freeze the character's rigidbody to prevent unintended movement.

Feedback:

• Something to tell player that they need to click inside character's body to trigger the attack. Some people might not know and think the game doesn't work.
• Visual representation of the power of the shot with suggestion of either charging up (more time consuming to get longer shots, and penalises people with poor power-accuracy), or make the power related to the distance of the mouse from the start where they shot / player position.
• Suggestion of having different expression when character got hit.

All of those feedback are  very great and constructive, where my plan for next week are:

• Visual to show whose character's turn it is.
  
• Visual for the power strength.
• Some different animation/expression for each character when some events happened (e.g being hit, win, etc).
• Wind will be the next step of factor playing important role to the game, therefore player need to adjust the power of throwing weapon in order to hit the opponent. (Will talk more about this in next week devlog)

So my priority for next week progress is adding wind factor to the game and more visual to enhance the experience of gameplay.

See you on next week devlog!