For my final personal project of this semester, I wanted to experiment some with simple shooter mechanics. Shooters are a really popular game style, in many different forms in the video game community. But they are a game style I have never really worked on over the last few years, so I felt like it would be interesting to experiment some with the typical basics of shooter games to familiarize myself. For this blog post I want to talk about my experiences with this project, what went right and wrong, and what I want to continue to change about it in the future.
What Did I Do For this project, there were a few different things that I worked on accomplishing. I made some basic player movement, and I added a switch between third person and first person cameras as well. I was experimenting some with holding a button to essentially lock yourself behind cover but I decided to pass on the idea after some experimentation. I also have a simple enemy that pops in and out of cover and takes shots at the player. Right now the enemy is rather inactive, but in the future I want to try and make it more responsive and move around in reaction to the player and to fight the player better. I also have some shooting that has pretty adjustable mechanics, so you can change up the enemy and player guns pretty easily.
What Went Wrong
The main two things that went wrong were in relation to time management and also some work being a bit more difficult then I anticipated. For the time management, it has been really tricky during the final semester to get everything done that I aspired to accomplish, across all classes and to work on things that expanded beyond class as well. As for work difficulty, I was having a tough time making a responsive AI enemy within the few weeks that I had to work on the project, and I was never quite able to make it work the way that I wanted so I left that out of the project entirely. I also did not really like the idea of having a button lock into place behind cover, at least for this experiment, so I abandoned that plan as well.
Future Goals
There are a few different things that I want to accomplish going forward with this project. I would like to put more time into making a more responsive and interesting enemy, along with anything that might come from that and making sure it would be working as intended. I think that would open up a lot more possibilities for what else I could do with the project in terms of creating new mechanics. Maybe experimenting with some different types of enemies or the ability to heal would be pretty nice as well, I think those are pretty core mechanics that would be worth testing out.
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