Hello Space Cadets!
Time for a recap of work done on Raygun Gadabout for June.
NPCs and Baddies
Quamar Station is a location you visit, it’s a junky old ore processing station that has become a meeting point for shady alien folk. You can come here to recieve some bounty hunting missions.
Begga here might give you a mission, you could do it regardless. The NPCs can act as hints to what you might do next.
Here is the scene in action. There’s a few more NPCs in this area that aren’t quite finished yet.
There’s also this mean looking fellow. How does that tiny hand carry the weight of that massive hammer head?
Planets and Mechanics
Created some new art and decorated some areas. I’m always surprised what a difference particle effects can make in a scene. Really liking the rolling dust clouds.
Speaking of rolling. Since you are able to dodge roll under low hanging ceilings, I decided to experiment with having them be able to increase your speed. There’s some fun possibilities here.
Here’s some more mechanics in action. Using anti grav boots to drop behind a new shield enemy. A small change I made was adding an adjustable delay to enemy turns rather than turning instantly.
I had tested out the air dodge in a previous alpha test, it didn’t go over great with the testers. It was slippery and unpredictable. Hard to use. I think a lot of that had to do with getting the spacing and distance figured out.
Below is the new air dodge with some juice. The directional arrow helps with being sure you don’t go an unintended direction. You are also locked into place and held there until you decide to move again.
Space Combat
Here’s a bit of space combat using a temp space ship asset. I had previously created some enemies that give chase but now I wanted something a little more, some actual shooting!
I found it tricky trying to keep the ships from clumping together, the solution that seems to work for the moment is creating a state machine to handle the ship AIs actions. It’s fairly basic at the moment: searching, attacking, manoeuvring.
One fun bit is I’ve been able to reuse some of the code from the platforming section in the space stuff, for example shooting and the new ship shield. The shield is still early days testing and could still get cut from the game.
That’s all for now
I’m currently trying to put together a new trailer that better represents the state of the game, the current trailer is from over a year ago.
Feel free to come by and say hello on the Raygun Gadabout Discord.
Hope to see you again next month!
M.
