Devlog 8: Elijah Jackson: What are you aiming at?!

"What are you aiming at?!"

Elijah Jackson

05/22/2025

Ranged Weapons:

My main focus this month has been improving the gameplay experience for the player. Now, I've set my eyes on improving the player's experience with our game through the improvement of our ranged combat mechanics. The first issue that needed to be addressed was the fact that the player was firing towards the left of the crosshair as opposed to the middle. This was a direct result of the player being more towards the left on screen. To fix this issue, I have the player rotating the barrel of their weapon towards the center of the screen where the crosshair is located. I experienced issues with the gun being inside walls or too close to something to accurately point at center screen that I rectified by using the dot product of the player's forward vector and the weapon's barrel to crosshair point vector. This vector allowed me to know if the player was actually aiming at something that they can see. Next, the ranged weapons were previously perfectly accurate no matter how you fired them, making aiming down sights much more powerful than it is supposed to be in a typical game. Additionally, there was no downside to hip firing prior. My work on making the ranged weapons feel different started in a simple place: making them less accurate in certain situations. I began by allowing the weapons to have spread, then changed that spread based on whether the player was aiming down sights or not. That resulted in the weapons feeling a bit more inaccurate but more realistic. Last, I added first shot accuracy to improve the fighting experience when tap firing. These mechanics were inspired by other shooters that I've played but resulted in much more complete feeling weapons. The result of that work looks like this:

Reworking the ranged weapons also came with the introduction of a new mechanic, ammo reserves. Each weapon will start with enough reserves to allow the player to use it for a while without issue, however the player will need to collect more ammo to continue using the weapon. The ammo feature is also showcased in the video. The benefit of reworking the ranged weapons is allowing for more variation. Simple number changes can allow the weapons to feel vastly different overall.

More UI Updates:

After working receiving more assets from my girlfriend, Caitlyn, I was able to improve the minimap and the skill tree screen. She is still working on more sprites for the UI and we hope to see more improvement over time! The new minimap icons and the new skill tree look like this:

Coming Up:

Going forward I plan to continue the improvement of the ranged weapons by giving them upgrades, and work the UI to match the improved weapons as well. I'm currently working on having ammo pickups for the player to increase their reserves for a certain weapon over time. I will also continue to work with general gameplay balancing as I add new options for the ranged weapons such as spread. Thank you for reading!