Build 3 - Basic Player Abilities

The Third Build

This build introduces simple implementations of some of the abilities and attacks that the player will have at their disposal. The implementations of these abilities are very basic at the moment, and actual interaction with enemies will happen in the future.

Player Abilities

In this build, most of the basic abilities the player can use are present, with 4 out of a planned 5 with a simple implementation. These abilities all have a resource cost associated with them so the player will have to manage attacking enemies and restoring this resource in the final game.

The first of these abilities is a simple cast/shoot type attack. This will be the primary attack that players will use to attack enemies, as it will have a fast in-air travel time allowing the player to hit enemies reliably.  It will also have a low resource cost, allowing it to be used very frequently. 

Current implementation of the standard attack. There is no cooldown on it at the moment, and as such it is fired every frame.

The second ability that the player can make use of is a shield, which will reflect enemy projectiles when more enemy functionality is implemented. When used, the shield spawns next to the player in the direction of the player's mouse, and disappears after a short period of time.

Current implementation of the shield. There will be a cooldown on it in the future, stopping it from being used in quick succession.

The third ability that is in this build is the player's utility ability, which allows the player to create platforms at the mouse position, allowing for more advanced platforming and map traversal. In their current implementation, the player can create as many platforms as they can within their resource limit, with each platform destroying itself after 15 seconds. In the future, I could keep this time limit on platforms, or I could remove this and create a limit to the number of platforms the player can create, with the oldest platform being destroyed when a new platform is created.

Current implementation of the platform ability.

The final ability that the player can use in this build is the recharge ability, which restores the resource which all other abilities require. In a future implementation, the rate of recharge will likely be slower, as it currently restores the 1 point of the player's ability juice every frame which is very fast, up to a cap of 100. I would also like to have this ability lock the player in place while they charge up, adding some depth of skill about when the player should use it, as well as add an animation to indicate to the player that they are recharging.

Current implementation of the recharge ability. After reducing the player's juice to 0, holding a middle-mouse click will restore it.

Next Steps

• Implement interaction between enemies and the player, as no abilities have any true functionality yet
• Update the graphics on the abilities to use stuff not from the player's spritesheet
• Add a user interface which shows the player critical information like their maximum and current health/juice/etc.
• Add attacks to the enemies