Weekly Devlog 3 : Enemies and Interaction

WELCOME TO WEEKLY DEVLOG OF EXILE'S ADVENTURE. 

It's third episode of this series and the thing i would introduce to you this week is ENEMIES AND INTERACTION. 

Why did I choose this for implementing? 

This week, two things have been added to Exile's Adventure: enemies and inventory system. The reason these two are added is very simple, because Exile's Adventure is an ARPG game, so combat and item will definitely be extremely important factors, which will greatly affect to the rating of this game. These are also 2 of the most important parts of the game so this devlog will be a fairly long and there may be a second devlog talking about the inventory system alone.

How was this created ?

First, let's talk about the enemies. The first thing I need to do is find the right monster and a tileset of it. After some research, i found that the wolf tileset of  William.Thompsonj  and Redshrike from OGA is what i need so I immediately come the next step : creating animation. Just like the character, I selected the individual images from this tileset and linked them using the unity animator system to create some animations for the wolf ( which I mentioned in Devlog 1 ). I have also added some conditions for them to make sure that the animations will trigger properly with the behaviour of the wolf. 

Credit William.Thompsonj and Redshrike from OpenGameArt.org (https://opengameart.org/content/lpc-wolf-animation)

But right after done the animation, I felt the wolf was missing something and I immediately realized it was the health bar, which can help the player to easily know the current health of the wolf.  It can be created very easily using Unity's UI system, which is Canvas, so I didn't take too much effort to get it done.

Finally, I moved on to write some code to make the wolf work. First, I've created a circle around it so that when the player enters the circle, the code will activate the wolf's tracing mode with the direction of movement will be the vector from the current position of the wolf to the player's position ( come to the next section to see how it work in the game ).  Then, I created a wolf health system, using some code to adjust its health bar. And lastly, to control the wolf's movement, I still use the Rigidbody2D system of unity like the player's (which was also mentioned in Devlog 1).

The circle around the wolf

Come to the inventory system, it's not really new to the game like monsters, but this is my first introduction to it, so I'll count it as the first week it gets added. In order to create the Exile's Adventure inventory system, I have watched many tutorials of many different people, but the one that affects me as much as possible is the series of Brackeys ( https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPV2KyIb3jR4KLGCCAciWQ5qHudKtYeP7 ). I'll leave the part how it was created of inventory system to another separate Devlog because it's really long, complicated and there's a lot I want to talk about so please look forward to it.

How does this work ? 

Currently, the wolf has only 2 modes: standing and tracing.  As I mentioned above, there is a circle around it and based on that, each mode will be selected to be displayed: 

• If the player is outside that radius, the wolf will stand still (the gif will show how it work )

Standing stage of the wolf

• If the player is inside the radius, the wolf will start tracing the character ( the gif will show how it work)

Tracing stage of the wolf

Coming to the working of the inventory, now the inventory will appear when the player press I and will close when you click on the blue X button at the top left. 

Items in the inventory can be used by left-clicking on it or destroyed by pressing the red X button at the top right of the item. Moreover, these items all have their own stats and will show an index when the player points to them. When wearing these items, the player will be added with the correct stats of the items and you can see it in the gif below.

Feedback and Improvement 

In the tutorial time of KIT109 of UTAS, i had received a feedback about the enemies and interaction through some testers, who are my classmates  : 

Courtney : " They can shove the player through the colliders on the walls, by the way. At least the bottom walls "

Just like Courtney said, the wolf now can push the character against the wall and there is no way to get out of it. I did knew this error while testing my game but I couldn't figure out  how to solve it. I will do more tests in the next week to find out the cause and fix this error as soon as possible so don't worry if your character gets stuck on the walls now.

For improvement part of this week,  it will definitely be making the monster, namely the wolf, can attack the player. I thought to do this I would create another circle around the wolf, but this time it will be smaller. And in the same way the wolf switched to tracing, now when the player enters the smaller circle, attacking mode will replace tracing mode, and deal some damage to the player. In addition, since this is an ARPG game, the item drop after defeating monsters is guaranteed to appear at the earliest once I find an effective way to make it.