Making Progress Again

The last update I made to this game was apparently in September 2024, which doesn't feel right, but also feels entirely possible. 

Work and life got in the way to such a degree that I 

I'm working on a pretty substantial refactoring of the game so that I can start to make better progress.

Why? You're still basically in prototype mode. 

A few reasons: 

• Finding anything in the current project is miserable. Expanding anything makes me anxious. I need better organization.
• I want the option to add a multiplayer arena mode later, and the current setup prohibits it. 
  
• Any other modes or scenes I want to add, I'll want to be able to reference external events rather than copy-pasting events into the event sheet.

I've accomplished a few things already:

Player Controller and Controls

• Moved from main game scene events sheet into an external event sheet.  
• Added gamepad support. 
• Added support for weapon switching on mobile.
• Made the touch joystick a little bit less reliable. Need to investigate why this is the case.  I suspect it has something to do with making the Player move only when the player is touching the joystick, and it's very easy to move the touch point off the virtual joystick while playing.
• Fixed broken boost. 

I'm also considering, in addition to mobile, keyboard, and gamepad controls, a mouse-and-keyboard option. Stay tuned for those experiments. 

I've surprised myself in making the gamepad my new favourite way to play the game. 

Weapons

• Moved from main game scene events sheet into an external event sheet.  
  
• Fixed bug (sort of) where the Nitro Cracker would not inherit player's linear velocity and would never properly accelerate to its maximum speed.  May need to do some more work on this one. 
• Increased turning speed of the Magnetic Plasma when it's near a moving object. Much more satisfying now. 
• Made it impossible to switch to a weapon that has no ammo. (This is still a little buggy). 

Other

• Disabled commuters for now. These will be added back in soon. 
• Added some in-progress art for explosions, but this needs to be properly edited. Mixing sprites and 3D sprites is getting a little messy. 
• Fixed some places where we referenced the hopper object instead of the Player object group. This is with an eye to a) being able to switch cars and b) multiplayer modes. 

More to come! I'm so enjoying being back in this project.