It’s been almost two weeks and i’ve been very busy with my day job so i didn’t manage to spare too much time for game, but i finally finished (for me) a very complicated thing – upgrade and weapon switching system.

Player starts out with one weapon. During the game he can pickup a variety of weapons from destroyed cargo ships. The first time he picks up a weapon, it is added as a second weapon, and player can switch between them according to situation (bullet, energy and missile weapons don’t deal the same amount to normal, armored and shielded enemies). When another weapon appears as a pickup, two scenarios are possible: if the weapon is already equipped, it gets upgraded and the pickup despawns. If the weapon is already at maximum upgrade level, player is notified via on-screen message and the pickup stays where it is. If the weapon is not equipped, currently selected weapon is replaced (dropped as a pickup, while pickup spawns on player). While dropping the weapon is not very important in single player game and complicates the situation a lot, it is handy in 2 player game, where one player can drop a weapon for the other player to upgrade his weapon. The handy thing is that when a player drops, for example, Hyperblaster Level 4 and the other player picks it up, he’ll get the Level 4 Hyperblaster too, not level 1. Since there are (for now) 23 weapons in game and the only way to upgrade them (besides universal weapon upgrade pickups) is to pickup the same weapon, that will be very cool in terms of player cooperation.

Here’s a shot of an FSM:

Basically, when the weapon spawns, it checks itself if it is a weapon or a pickup (by checking if it is parented or not). If it is a weapon, that means that it is player equipped and it is added to the array and the variable is stored if it is in slot one or slot two (required for weapon switching during the game). If it is a pickup, distance check state is activated. Player can only pick it up if he is closer than a defined distance from it (by pressing space, so no accidental pickups are possible). When he picks it up, it iterates through the array to see if it will replace the existing weapon (if no weapon of same type is found) or upgrade it (if weapon of same type is found). If it replaces it, the existing weapon is dropped (which means it is despawned, removed from array, spawned on location of a pickup with its firing scripts disabled and pickup indicator enabled, while next level weapon is spawned on gunpoint with its firing scripts enabled and pickup indicator disabled).
Weapon switching is, compare to the upgrade and pickup system, a walk in the park. Stored weapons are simply activated/deactivated by pressing the switch key.

Scripting this thing alone would probably take a lot more time than it did, so using Playmaker did the job pretty quick since i can try something out in a matter of seconds, not waiting to write a couple of lines with risk of making syntax errors.

But, here comes the downside. Instead of making the script that can just be copied/pasted on all weapons (have in mind that there are 23 weapon with 3-5 levels each, so that comes to about a hundred prefabs, with more to come), i have to copy/paste an FSM to every weapon and tweak the variables in each one of them. I don’t have to tell you that if any larger scale fixes in logic are necessary when all the weapons are already prepared it will be a lot of work to change everything. Not to mention the possibility of making errors when managing such a tedious task.

One more thing i did is implementing the sprite atlas which reduced draw calls a lot, and boosted frame rate from 15-30 FPS to ~150. Now everything goes very smoothly. There are some hiccups, but those are due to extensive logging which is quite necessary in this phase. Swarm missiles got an overhaul too, now they’re flying nicely in a semi-random homing pattern, they way i imagined them to be.

Also, the artist guy did some weapons art for me, some will maybe change, but i thing they’re pretty good looking and quite different.

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