I have been working on Artillery Brawl, with stuff that was left incomplete when I stopped working on it in July. I haven't started on prototyping shooting yet, because I have some related stuff to do first. I have completely changed the units are represented in the code. Instead of a single entity for a unit, there are now several entities for the different parts of a unit; body, turret, later tracks and wheels. To keep all these together, I made a component (an entity is composed of components) that groups several entities together, so I can still essentially handle the unit as a single entity. At least to me, it's a very clean solution, as all these features are in self-contained components, with the entity only containing components which it doesn't know about. At some point, I'm going to have to write about my final entity system in detail, but first I need to actually finish it...

After this change is complete, I will probably work on fixing shell collisions and then move on to particle systems, camera improvements and other stuff related to trying to make shooting fun.

Happy belated holidays, everyone!

The core gameplay of each game has to be fun for the game on the whole to be fun. Platformers are about jumping, shooters are about shooting and Go is about placing stones on a board. Players are going to spend most of their time playing doing this core activity; everything else is basically extra to hook players at first or keep them interested in the long run. In Artillery Brawl, core gameplay is of course shooting, and before I dwelve into anything else, I have to make shooting fun. In other words, it has to be rewarding.

Artillery Brawl isn't fun yet. There are a couple of obvious problems I'm going to fix first and see what the results are, then decide what's to follow. First, there's absolutely no feedback or reward for shooting; there aren't any kind of effects (visual or aural) when you shoot or hit something, and units simply disappear when they are destroyed. Not very fun at all. So I'm going to add some particle explosions and sound effects to help with that. Explosions are always fun, right?

Second, there's the user interface. Currently shooting is controlled with the arrow keys and modifiers (alt and shift), but while I want to keep that, I also want to add mouse control that's dead simple to use. It should be immediately obvious (at least after pressing the Shoot! button once or twice) what to do in the game without any kind of documentation or tutorials.

Last, but certainly not least, there's the camera. Currently, other than automatically focusing on the current unit when a turn begins, the camera is completely manual. With the turn system I have in place; multiple tiny shells in the air, many things happening at once and many players in front of the same screen, each interested in different things, this simply won't work at all. I have to improve the automatic behaviour of the camera, and luckily I have a couple of simple to implement improvements in mind. At the beginning of a turn, the camera should focus so that the current unit and the place the last shot landed should be visible. Between turns, the camera should zoom out, showing as much as possible. When a shell is about to land, the camera should zoom in on that. Later, I can improve it so that if multiple shells are about to land at the same time, I can use a picture-in-picture to show both at once. Also, I'm going to improve the visibility of both units and shells, and add a minimap.

If, after these improvements are in place, the game still isn't beginning to approach fun, I'll have to either change something dramatically or start a new project. Simple as that.