Well well, would you look at the time! It's time for another entry in your favourite Weekly Update blog! This week was quite busy I have to say. There were a lot of things to develop, refactor and design. However, there's only one new challenge this time. Nevertheless, let's get started!
Challenge #5
So let's talk about this new challenge. It's rather a unique and interesting one.
Up until now, challenges were either of the puzzle or platform variety. Now, there's a new type: the combat challenges.
This jungle challenge takes place on a raft sailing on a turbulent river. To win, you need to defeat many waves of enemies.
Once you clear a wave, the next one starts shortly after.
After clearing every wave, the raft slowly docks on a wooden pier onto which the loot can be seen free for the grabbing.
Like most challenges, this one also got two difficulty levels. On normal, you'll fight 3 waves of 3 enemies. On difficult, everything is doubled. So there are 6 waves of 6 enemies.
Although it seems that the raft is moving, this is not the case at all. Instead, the game uses several tricks to simulate movement. This gives the impression of a longer river at no cost.
At first, it was a bit difficult to spawn reliable enemies. Fortunately, Unity has its own navigation AI system. It was just a matter of cooking a navmesh on the raft. With a bit of enemy AI refactoring, everything was up and runing.
Now that I have scripts for managing enemies in challenges, I'm thinking of adding enemies to other challenges...
Anyway, here's a little video showcasing it:
Minor Updates
- Refactored enemy AI
- Added speed control in texture scrolling shaders.
- Optimized some unoptimized scripts.
- All in all I gained ~10 FPS.
- Some of these were quite stupid, to say the least...
Next Week
I'm on a roll lately! For next week I'm planning on focusing exclusively on creating new challenges.
So for now, let's complete the jungle challenges. And after all of this is done it's your usual suspects.
So that's about it.
Oh, don't forget that there's a Patreon exclusive Bonus Update if you want to read more! So see you over there!