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 combining overpowered modules that can be traded as crypto-backed items.
Updates
Turret Design: The whole stat data structure and calculation system is done! I’ve started working on the getting the turret to react to the inputs now based on the module’s stats.
Personal Life: Despite a few hiccups, I have mostly managed to hit my goal of habitually working on the game every day, while even still finding some relaxation time.
Progress
Turret Design
The stats have two aspects: the base stats, and their modifiers/calculations. Each module has various base settings for example, a bullet with a damage of 5 etc, however, what adds a new element of uniqueness and balance, is that the stats of one module will affect the stats of another. So, a greater damage value will decrease the armor piercing of the bullet. Thus, as a player, you must carefully select your modules well, otherwise you might create very lopsided turrets, or ones mediocre in everything! This is especially true with the Module Improvements. These are modules that can indefinitely be stacked onto your turret to keep boosting the base stats. Now, even though each stat can affect another, the negative modifiers are outweighed by the positive ones slightly. This means eventually you could still create a turret perfect in every way. I really believe it is important to reward players for persistence and not force them with artificial constraints. Of course, this is going to be a nightmare for me to balance but that is another problem for another time 😉
This week I will hopefully finish getting the turret to react accordingly to the stats, such as rotation speed, and shooting based on the gun’s cooldown, recoil, and fire rate etc. The second part will be to get the input system to work cross-platform with the actions. The funny thing is that Unity released a massive update to the input system the night I finished the stat system, so I will take this as a positive sign haha (knock on hard wood).
Personal Life
Things have continued to be a little calmer – not to say stress free by any means, but I am at least able to appreciate things again with balance.
I have managed to consistently find the time and motivation to work on the game almost every single day for a couple hours at least. Finally getting into this habit of commitment is very inspirational itself and is great to see the game progressing a little every day. One of the things that is keeping me going is that I am just setting aside time to work on the game, rather than specific milestones. As long as I put in the time each day, I feel that I am making progress. Otherwise, if I had to implement a feature every day, I would become overwhelmed. So, for any of you guys suffering from overwhelm, perhaps you could give this method a try as well.
I have still been managing to find some time as well to keep playing some of my classic childhood games. This weekend I did a little bit of Spore, which is another inspiration to me due to its procedural generation and player created content.
The feelings of nostalgia are certainly very surreal, a bit of sadness, longing, and hope all rolled into one package. I hope one day that A Turret’s Life can invoke fond childhood memories in others as well!
Join the Community!
Website: https://www.aturretslife.com/
Telegram: https://t.me/aturretslife
Comments