Options and features and revamps, oh my! (Update soon, I swear)

Been a little longer than I initially wanted since the last dev log, but I just wanted to give an update of things I've been working on. I hope to release a full update within the next week, but feature creep is starting to set in a little. However I do feel a lot of these are justified in really contributing to the overall gameplay.

Or at least that's what I keep telling myself.

Menu

Options Menu Revamp

 The skip intro was already automatic after the first playthrough, just because it was janky filler a little long and annoying if you've already seen it once. I'll probably update the intro soon too, but keeping the very lax feel of the game. I'm not huge on fantasy stories, so frankly the game is gonna be filled with shitty memes and lots of little easter eggs. A nice thing I found is that, when I upload this to Itch, there's already some code to just remove the resolution options, as they won't be relevant anyways.

Auto-Hide Weapon Hotbar Option

Because of the rushed nature of a game jam, and my lack of working with cursor functions, this was something I wanted to do from the start, but wasn't important enough to waste time looking into how to do it. Once I did look, turns out this was actually very easy to do. At the very least, now I know for the future.

private void AutoHideHotbar()
{
    if (cam.ScreenToViewportPoint(Input.mousePosition).y <= 0.2f)    
         weaponIcons.SetActive(false);         
    else weaponIcons.SetActive(true);  
}

The main reason I wanted to do this was, because of the size of the UI, I found it to be a pain in the ass when you're aiming down and trying to see what's going on among the weapon icons. Some may not really be that bothered by it, so I decided to make it an optional feature. One thing that still I also want to add in the near future is a way to "stretch" the camera, based on the position of the mouse. This would be a way to give more vision when you're fighting enemies. I haven't quite taken the time to figure it out just yet, but it's still on the way.

Camera Shake

Nothing too crazy, but I wanted to give a little more oomph to those overload explosions. Pretty happy with how it came out, but I wanted to make it adjustable who may find the frequent shaking to be a bit nauseating. 

Gameplay

More Enemy AI

I'm finally finished with adding AI to the different enemies, although some of them may be subject to change, once I get more feedback. As a recap:

• Druids: AoE speed buff to enemies, will not be hurt directly by projectiles
• Gnomes: Exclusively targets player, will charge into you, deal half a heart's worth of damage, and stun for a brief moment
• Hero: Will go in front of nearby allies if they're hurt, guarding them to the death
• Barbarians: Will deal 1 extra damage from overload explosions and, in turn, cause even bigger explosions. They can also be aggro'd, but will deal a much more powerful dash attack, so be careful!
• Recruit: 'New' enemy that will basically take place of the mindless units from before. Since the heroes got revamped, needed a common enemy that will provide some basic targets rather than just all specialty enemies

Mana Orbs

These were an idea I had more recently to help really focus the gameplay on achieving those big booms. The idea is that now, rather than just passive mana regeneration, little orbs will burst out when an overload occurs, that will fly towards you and reward you will bonus points and mana. So passive regeneration has been nerfed in order to shift the focus on more thoughtful play. Part of this was inspired by the hero revamp: you can try to just spam attacks and kill enemies, but you'll have to pay attention to heroes who may soak up enough all the damage to negate a potential overload. 

Difficulty Options

I'm a bit of a sadomasochist when it comes to games, so I really enjoy a tough challenge. It was hard to strike a balance for the jam to make it as accessible for everyone, while still maintaining some sort of difficulty to keep it exciting. For now, it mostly just affects mana: passive regeneration, orbs per explosion, orb mana. I don't plan on making it affect things like enemy stats or player damage. I'm trying to keep a more arcade-style of design in mind, where your experience is your best tool to progressing in the game. The harsher difficulty options will add little extra squeeze, making you have to be very mindful of your aim and prioritization of enemies.

Graves

As I've been playing more, I've found the graves idea less and less appealing now that I've balanced and fleshed out gameplay more. Initially, they would be used as a fail-safe to, say, stop a druid you may have accidentally failed to kill. Once an enemy got too close, a skull would fly out to attack them and kill them in one hit. Now that I've given an overall boost to the size of overloads, they've seemed less necessary. I'll still keep them as a visual flair, but I may possible push them back to the center of the map as one last saving grace, as it sometimes felt like enemies would get to the graves so fast that they'd be wasted.

Score System Revamp

Gaining points in the jam version of the game was very clunky, as that was one of the things I did a couple hours before submission. Again, to focus on the idea of overloading your weakened enemies with damage, you would get more points if you can combo enemies. I tried to do this by just making a counter to see how many enemies you hit, and passing along a 'combo' int to enemies to adjust how many points they'd give if they died. This gave some funky numbers at times and the implementation was very messy. Now, when the explosion does a check to see enemies that will be caught in the blast, they are first all evaluated whether or not they'll be killed. If they are, then the counter is incremented, and then when another loop is done to apply damage, the combo number will be passed along. Because I made the explosions their own objects, this also made sure that the initial enemy to die would also be affected by this calculation, giving more accurate numbers.

Finishing Up

The last few things I need to adjust before releasing is making some other wave types, cramming a difficulty menu somewhere, making some visual adjustments to the map, and trying to make enemy spawns a little cleaner. Hope the update will be well-received, but I'd love to hear feedback no matter what!