So for the first game this year I am going with my idea of being a bank robber in a situation where the heist has gone wrong and is currently in a shootout with the police. While the police are shooting at the player constantly I wanted the player to not have the ability to shoot back. This, for me, makes the game more difficult as there is no way to beat/kill the bad guy. Also I wanted to play with the idea where the robber, who in normal situations would be the bad guy, is actually the good guy (the player). In this game the player has to collect 5 bags of loot to be able to escape the bank and while collecting the loot, the player has to avoid being shot and further, being busted by the police. By the final play test of the game, it had 8 separate builds, each with their own issues. I had an interesting experiences with issues in this game. While some of them were fixable with fairly straightforward coding there were some that needed me to use what I call, backdoor fixes. An example of this was the collisions with the bullets I was having were not exact in any way. The player would die if the bullet came close to the player but the basically the player was dying when he wasn’t actually getting hit. To fix this, I utilized icons. So while I was displaying the icons, I made the original drawings invisible and turned them into hitboxes and made them smaller. Interestingly enough, when I made the hitboxes smaller than the icons, I was able to make the collisions look like they were hitting the icons perfectly. And while I know this is by no means a permanent fix, it has been a temporary one that will suit me very well in the long run until I have a more complex and precise collision code. Let’s take a look at some screenshots:
This is what the game looked like bare bones with no added icons or backgrounds.
As you can see the yellow player is clearly not actually getting hit, but a collision has been detected.
This is what the game currently looks like, it still needs some aesthetic work, but I like where its headed.
All the loot has been collected and the getaway appears.
Whew, Just managed to get away!
As you can see the collision detection is so much better now.
