More game work in Unity

Posting some more progress of the game.

Gotten a real basic UI in place now, still needs some touch up as you can end up in situtations where there is a negative health displayed on the scree.

The AI in place actually works, sort of… It’s real basic and “cheats” in that it knows where the player is in world space (where as the human player does not). Essentailly its a realy simple alogrithm where it take a first shot at random and then know whether it’s shot landed too far or too close and then adjusts the next shot to fit in whithin those new constraints. While she’ll whittle down close to the player tank, he will still get into weird states where it will keep missing you. I seem to recall friends of mine running into these issues building their own AI’s. I’ve got to do more research here to determine what a good algorithm here might be.

Contemplating different camera angles, but after trying them out it took it too far away from the “Scorched Earth” game concept (if nothing else just to give me some guardrails to get to completion), as well as added additional complexity with the third dimension.

I finally worked in a basic start UI just so it looks like a more “complete” game. I’ve got get the tail end of it done as well so you actually go through and progress through the game. My thinking is that I’ll work in how to “quit” and then how to “win” and from there I’ll go fill in the levels in between.

Speaking of the levels in between, I implemented some simple procedural generation of the terrain, which turned out to be dead simple. With Unity you can simply access the Terrain objects height map and just set it dynamically. I simply utilized the built in Perlin noise generation that Unity comes with and that gave me a decent starting place. Ideally I could rely on procedural map generation and amp the difficulty up using some other mechanic (more accurate enemies, etc) , however I might end up having to draw up some maps anyways.

That’s it for now, I’ve been diving into writing custom shaders as well. Not sure if they’ll fit into this project but they’re cool to learn about (I had no idea you could do some of the things you can do with them).

Gonna try and get the following done this week:

• Windows build
• Different types of shells (Sabot vs. HEAT)
• Experiment with eliminating the power controls (only have elevation)
• Shell contrail
• Animate turret