Raycaster Mode

[AEFeinstein]

Summary Turn the raycaster into a real game. The player should be able to walk around and shoot/zap enemies. Enemies should also walk around and shoot/zap back. Player and enemy health will be tracked. Player may have infinite ammo, or ammo pickups, unsure.

TODOs

• [x] Cast walls
• [x] Texture Walls
• [x] Cast Sprites
• [x] Draw HUD sprites (gun? health/ammo indicator?)
• [x] Animate enemy sprites (walking, firing, being shot)
• [x] Health and ammo pickups?
• [x] Make basic enemy AI (walking around, shooting player)
• [x] Add top level menu
• [x] Add difficulty options
• [x] Add high scores (time to clear?)
• [x] LED Support (getting shot, shooting something, passive radar)

[AEFeinstein]

Doom monster behavior. Seems simple and good enough to use.

Monsters generally try to close in on their target via the shortest possible route. If the direct route to the target is blocked by a wall or a solid thing that the monster walks into, it randomly picks another direction to move in for a short while (to find another route to its target) until it reverts to heading straight toward its target again.

A monster does not need to have a line of sight to follow its target, and will attempt to close in on its position within the level.

If a monster with no melee attack reaches its target and "bumps" into it, it will move away from it for a while in a similar fashion it does when hitting any other obstacle.

If a monster has no target, it is in the dormant state and will not move.

[AEFeinstein]

Sprite movement directly to the player is a bit much, maybe only do it on X or Y axis?

[AEFeinstein]

Feedback from @jt-moriarty

• [x] Enemy corpses block player shot, but don't block enemy shots (need to make symmetric)
• [ ] Damage animation is a bit prolonged, shorten that up
• [x] Add tension at low health (pulse LEDs?)
• [x] Add more feedback when taking damage (flash heart in addition to red LEDs)
• [ ] Hard to place self visually, wall textures were a hint. Not sure if there's anything to be done here

[AEFeinstein]

@jt-moriarty toying with the raycaster, I realize that one of the reasons I made the 'hurt' animation a little slower was to have a visual cooldown on when the sprite could get shot. This incentivizes players to not focus-fire on harder difficulties. With a quicker animation, its a bit too easy to shoot twice real fast. Knowing that, what are your thoughts on the animation speed?

[Brycey92]

Perhaps the walls need some more-regular textures like vertical/horizontal gridlines, diagonals, repeated squares or circles, etc. Kinda like VR chaperone bounds.

[AEFeinstein]

My principles for the textures were

• 48px x 48px
• Avoid continuous vertical lines. That's because corners between walls are always drawn as vertical lines, and if those are the only vertical lines, they're easier to distinguish and help you place yourself in the map.
• Avoid a black horizontal stripe in the middle of the texture. This is because if you run right up to the wall, it wouldn't draw anything. This was actually a bigger problem before the HUD was drawn, now it doesn't matter as much
• Make sure each detail was at least 2px wide so that it would scale relatively well.
• Tile horizontally (and vertically, just for kicks)
• Have three visually distinctive textures so you could tell when you could distinguish what room you're in
• Have a fourth texture specifically for objects within rooms, not attached to walls.

Here's what I came out with:

Walls: Room objects:

With all that in mind, would you like to draw some more-regular textures?

[Brycey92]

Perhaps if I have enough free time after the final tweaks to tunernome, but don't count on me getting to it before the feature freeze. Though I guess this counts as fixes so we're able to do it after the freeze?

[AEFeinstein]

Yeah. Something like "add more textures, redo whole map" is something I'd rather not do, but "replace texture" is pretty trivial to do.

[AEFeinstein]

@jt-moriarty added a red LED pulse at quarter health, on screen icon blinks when you lose health or defeated an enemy