Development on Rogue Lives continued this week.
I made some improvements to room generation mostly focused on monster placement in water rooms. I don’t want players getting stuck because there’s an enemy on an unconnected island and they don’t have a range weapon to reach it. Therefore, when adding an island during level generation, the function will check if the island is connected to the main path. If the player doesn’t have a ranged weapon, enemies that will not be added on the unconnected islands.
This also meant I had to make changes to items in the game. I game the base Adventure Item class a IsRanged property and added them to the lists stored in game for easy access when they need to be added to the player. They also show up properly in the UI with their own icons that can be cycled through using the Z and X keys on keyboard.
I also worked on making the game controllable using a gamepad. I set up the axes using Unity input but was having difficulty with things like requiring a press for things like using a weapon and cycling through secondary weapons until I realized I could use axes with GetButtonDown to detect only the first frame of a press.
The last somewhat big change since last week is the addition of alternate player characters so that it can be changed with each life. I currently have a set of 8 seen below but I hope to add more later and maybe far down the road, add in a system of randomly creating the character’s appearance with each life to better show how each life is supposed to be a new incarnation of the hero.
There were a bunch of minor things as well like the barebones versions of a main menu and a pause menu but that’s it for this week. I’ll keep working hard to bring you another update next week.
J.D. Kelly 