A Turret's Life is a first-person arcade shooter/tower defence game for PC and VR where you are the tower defending an area against the endless onslaught of attacking robots and crafting overpowered dream guns that can be traded as crypto-backed items.
Updates
This blog entry is a little on the lighter side. The week was quieter overall, but I still had some steady progress.
Turret Design: I finished the whole system for how players will add and swap out modules mid-game and successfully tested it with visuals.
Personal Life: My energy levels are still low, but I am starting to feel calmer and am finding some time to relax.
Progress
Turret Design
Most of this week has been spent on finalizing the module placement system and data structures. This is a huge interconnected web of stats - how each module must connect to one another physically and also access the stats of one another to calculate how the turret will function. This is really the groundwork for the whole game, as all actions derive from how the stats of the turret interact with one another. And of course, the module stats are derived from the Enjin-backed items, so they are critical to the game and add to the fun of collecting and trading😊
In the next couple days, I should be finished adding in the stat systems for the larger turret parts, namely the guns, body, and actual bullets. The next steps are adding functionality to the turret. I have broken this down into two parts, inputs and actions.
The actions are how the turret will respond to input, such as rotating and shooting. This will get somewhat technical as I will have to figure out the best way to handle the mathematics of the rotation limits, speed, fire rates etc. I am making this separate from the inputs so it can work easily with any input system necessary. The reasoning for this is that the game will be very multi-platform, so I don’t want to hard-code all the controls into a single system only to have to redo them all for another platform. By separating the actions and inputs, the different input systems should be able to interface into the same actions.
The input system is where the game responds to the different controls. At this point, that will include keyboard/mouse, gamepad, VR Desktop, VR mobile/Android. In the future, I would like to extend the game to more platforms like regular Mobile, Switch, and the new streaming platforms like Stadia. However, I am not sure as to what the best input system is for all this. I had been hopeful for Unity’s new system, but they have not updated it for a while and it seems quite unreliable so far. But fingers crossed I can use it soon, since it is supposed to be a very flexible system. The hope with the inputs is to only have one generic system that works for everything instead of having to create a custom solution for each platform. If Unity’s system does not work, I might have to look at third party solutions, but it is hard to find one that works with VR and non-VR, so I still might end up having to create a custom solution to an extent.
Personal Life
Two weeks ago, I decided on reducing some of the scope of the project, and I feel much more certain that it was the right decision now. I am really enjoying working on the project again and feel that the scope now closer matches my ability in the given situation. In the future, any feature that was put on hold for now can always be added in 😊 anyways.
In addition, I have managed to find some time to just relax now, doing some occasional gaming during the week. So often game developers spend all their time making games and never playing them, and I was no exception. However, I was able to play a bit of the game Overload. The game has a visual that is somewhat similar to A Turret’s Life so I think that is a good source of inspiration -in fact, it’s spiritual predecessor, Descent 3, was my main inspiration for some of the robot ideas. Descent 3 was a childhood nostalgia game of mine and I have many fond memories of playing it with my family and friends. I think one of the great powers of video games is how they can connect people to one another. What are your guys’ favorite childhood games?
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Website: https://www.aturretslife.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/aturretslife
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