A lot of progress was made on TACTICAL BANDITS development this month, but I still missed the deadlines I set for myself.
I continued this month’s development where I left of last month, which was with updating the art style. I decided to incorporate the art style from the long way into TACTICAL BANDITS and the game does look much better now.
I did have to remove all the levels I created last month, as they did not work with the new camera system, but hopefully that will only make this game much stronger.
Some of the other major updates I have made to TACTICAL BANDITS this month are:
- Updated character health system
- Updated weapon system
- Updated player shooting
Shooting is now much faster and more fun, but it has been constantly updated over the month. It still is not perfect due to how it is created because sometimes it goes through characters. I believe I have found the issue so I should be able to fix it next month.
At the end of April, the shooting was using colliders and used the physics system to detect when it hit something to apply damage. The problem with this system was that if the bullets were travelling too fast, they would possibly “miss” collisions because of the distance it will travel between frames.
To fix this, I decided to stop using colliders and use a sphere cast instead. A sphere cast is a raycast but casts a sphere. The reason I use this instead of a normal raycast is that it means the player does not have to be 100% accurate for a hit to be detected.
Every frame, I do a sphere cast between the position of the last frame and the current frame and get back the first object it hits, if anything was hit. This worked great until I found that sometimes it will hit something that should not destroy the bullet and ignore the object behind it, which could be character. This made the bullet sometimes go through characters.
To fix this issue, I decided to use a sphere cast all function. This is similar to the normal sphere cast, but this functions casts the ray from start to end and returns all hits. I was getting more consistent hits back now, but something else was off. The hits returned back were not in order, so the ray would sometimes hit a character and a wall behind it and return it back in an array with the wall as the first element. This meant the bullet was destroyed from the wall and the character would not be hit.
I know have a possible solution to this problem is by getting back all the hits from the ray, and ordering them from distance. I am going to implement that next month and hopefully that will solve all the issues with shooting.
Apart from shooting, I did try to get TACTICAL BANDITS ready for a gaming festival, which I did not manage to do. I did manage to get the Steam store page in review. A lot of progress as you can see.
Next month I am going to focus on fixing a lot of minor issues before they turn into major issues and polish the character and the control so they feel much better. I am also going to plan out the game modes that will make into the final version of TACTICAL BANDITS.