My little adventure into game development
I'm a big fan of the MechWarrior universe from games like MechWarrior 3, to MechCommander, to BattleTech. I really enjoy the universe that they're set in.
There existed a game in my mind that I thought would be cool if it existed. I want a challenge as well in my own personal life. I am very good at web development and such. So I tend to stick to using AI to help me build the products that I think would be cool if they existed, just sort of messing around. But I wanted something outside of my comfort zone that I could use to stretch my mind and flex that muscle again to find the enjoyment in programming and constructing something with your hands again.
And this game was just a top down wave clear game, sort of like, Brotato. That game has a really fun game loop, especially when you do a co-op. So I was like, what if you take Brotato and you put it in the MechWarrior universe? How cool would that be? And then you can get really fancy with it.
Anyway, I've been working on this for maybe a couple weeks with Claude teaching me, guiding me as I get my feet under me and get used to game development, its patterns and using C#. And so far this is what I've got.
Right now what I have is an enemy spawns after about 5 seconds and it chases you down right into your face.
I've got very very rudimentary heat and health mechanics also a credit system I just put in today all by myself.
Well, I had Claude teach me about event buses and so I used an event bus because it started to tell me to well in order to emit the signal from the enemy Mech that it died.
We need to subscribe to it in main in the main scene and then from the main scene you need to emit essentially hot potato the signal to to another event handler which then you can subscribe to it in your HUD.
I thought there has to be a better way to do this. And in comes, event buses. So I created an event bus, which I can emit events to and subscribe from. It's like a town square of events where the emitters and the subscribers can meet up in handshake.
so when I do enough damage with my ray traced laser and the enemy dies, it emits a signal that it has died and then I give myself 100 credits. So I think the foundation is there to add some scalability with different kinds of Mechs, more Mechs and a credit system.
when you reach your max heat, you will shut down and you're unable to move until your heat drains. And then you can do stuff again. The controls are pretty good, I think. The mouse is used to aim the torso and the laser, but I don't really like it too much. And I'm not exactly sure how to change it. But once I dial in the movement and how I want that mechanic to work, I think that'll become clearer.
The next step I think is going to be creating some sort of end screen. So when I kill my one and only enemy, it says game over, wave cleared, something like that. And then a inventory type HUD will pop up where I can choose a new weapon and then attach that weapon to my Mech.
Anyways, that's it. Thanks for reading.
