Second Week on new FPS Development: Progress continues.

It's been a week since my last post in which I announced that I suspended development on the RPG project I was working on for a whole year, to start working on a simpler, shorter game. When I wrote that post I had already been working for a week in the FPS. And judging by the speed with which development was progressing in the new project, I made an early estimation on how much time it would take me to make the basic minimum systems and mechanics work for this game. Again I'll repeat I'm not referring to media like graphics, animations, sounds, etc, but just functionality, provided with code. Also remember that I'm making a FPS like the good old ones, Doom, Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, and Serious Sam. I guessed a month. So here is in this blog post I'll write down what my progress was on the second week of development.

Some obstacles to test out the jumping mechanic.

So I made doors work, with key functionality included. So some doors will be locked and the player will have to find a key to unlock them and open them. I've also written the code for collectible items that the player will have the chance of discovering while exploring the levels, the triggers of secret areas, and of course the code that records how many secrets, collectibles, and enemies are in each level, and how many the player found or killed. I also made a functional Body Armor pickup, and I coded in 5 more weapons. I don't want to spoil so I will only tell you about the two of them. One is a shotgun with enough spread to hit multiple enemies on the right distance, and the other is a rocket launcher. The rocket launcher is my favorite. When the rocket hits somewhere, the enemies that are in the blast radius loose health, as also the player. Plus if there are physics-enabled objects, explosion force is applied to them, and they fly around! Hehe. It was so much fun, I've spent a good time just shooting away rockets at enemies, boxes with physics, etc. Aside from these I also made several smaller stuff improving stuff that was already there. I also let someone play the game for the first time. There's not much to play yet, I just did some fast terrain editing to raise hills to create a bunch of "rooms", and placed some simple enemies in them. Although the person that played the game is a gamer inexperienced with game testing, and thus most of his feedback was about content (graphics, enemy creatures,etc) and I'm not focused on such stuff currently, there was a single piece of feedback that I found useful. It was about the angle that the 1st person camera is allowed to be rotated vertically with the use of the mouse. The player wanted the ability for the character to be able to look further upwards. To speak the truth, the angle was something I had some doubts already. The initial angle I was using was 45 degrees. I actually just googled it, and found a website saying that it's been considered normal for a person to be able to tilt the head backwards from 45 to 70 degrees.

So I was in the short end of the spectrum, at the minimum limit for a healthy person. But you know what ? Video game heroes, and especially old-school FPS heroes, are more healthy than average, and often have super human abilities if you think about it. So I decided to change the angle limit, and make it 70 degrees. So now it is still within the amount a healthy person can rotate its head, which is required for the game to feel believable, but it's on the higher end, so the player can feel that the character's condition is flawless. I'll try to keep letting people play my game, and I want to have that take place once a week. Even from that early on, the second week.

So that's how the past week passed for me and my game. For the next 2 weeks I'm going to make a few more weapons, and add in stuff like an options menu, saving and loading functionality, etc. My goal is to have the standard game mechanics and systems functional in the first month of development.Then I'll start considering different enemy types, making 3D models for stuff that I have already working functionally (guns, pickups), and testing more to fix any bugs that might come up, and fine tune gameplay to make it more enjoyable.

Come back next week to read my report on what I did in it. If anything urgent happens in the mid-time, I'll make a blog post in between.