Well, you guys voted for this, so this is what I’m spending my Sunday evening on, I guess
Why a Mech?
Unlike the Carrier, the mech wasn’t really made to solve a problem. Therewas no problem, I sorta just felt like doing it. I wanted to see if I could make an enemy wildly different from a plane work in a plane game.
More importantly, I wanted to see if melee attacks from enemies had any place in this game. They needed to be both fun and threatening to fight. Melee attacks don’t exist in other plane games, so that alone made this interesting.
The Mech-A’s Movement
Before we get onto the attacks of the Mech-A, I had to make the Mech feel different from planes, and that came down to its movement.
Planes naturally move at a constant pace in the direction it faces, with relatively slow turning (to not turn the pilot into mush because that fucker Newton decided to invent the laws of motion). Mecha, especially in anime and games (eg. Armored Core), ignore inertia entirely (because Newton was never born in their world). They strafe and dash around, instantly accelerating in the opposite direction. That’s what I tried to replicate with the mech.
The Mech-A tries to always face it’s target head-on and strafes aggressively to avoid being within the targets line-of-sight.
Also, look:
It can fucking dash to dodge missiles.
Micromissiles!
Originally, I wanted the Mech-A to fire a bunch of missiles from its back, that loop around towards their target. Instead of writing a new script to make missiles turn 180 degrees and continue homing like a good gamedev, I did the lazy thing and just set their max homing angle to 99999 and called it a day.
Turns out, missiles that never stop homing are actually really fun to fight.
They’re slower than regular missiles, so they just keep the player constantly moving. It looks cool as hell to see a bunch of missiles barely pass you as you dodge.
Plus, if you’re good enough at parrying, parrying 8 missiles simultaneously is hella satisfying.
Melee Attack
This took quite a few iterations to get right, and I’ll give a short summary of each.
I first tried a massive slash which forces the player to roll so the wings of the player aren’t caught in the sword path. This sucks. You couldn’t see the mech because it would usually be offscreen / really far away when it attacked, and it felt like you were dodging a big red warning instead of the slash itself.
Then I tried a smaller slash, and with the mech dashing right next to the player before attacking. Really didn’t fix anything. It was supposedto fix the issue of the mech being offscreen during the attack, but if the player were to turn during the windup the mech would still be offscreen regardless. Plus, I had trouble implementing it nicely because of my major skill issue.
They say 3rd time’s the charm, lo and behold the 3rd time worked! This time, I looked at what games have already done, and I remembered the giant flak cannon explosions from Project Wingman. So like any good game dev, I copied them, and made the mech “teleport” in front of the player and try to slash at them. This solved everything.
- If you got hit, then the mech would be basically right in front of you most of the time. Even if the mech wasn’t and you got hit on an off angle, the mech would be really close by
- No ugly red indicator, the rift opening works as an indicator by itself.
- It looks fucking awesome.
Jfoe’s sound design on the rift was amazing too. Though, this site doesn’t support video or audio, so you’ll have to imagine it. Just imagine some real crisp sfx of a rift opening… mmm…
I’m kidding. Go check out my Yt/Twitter/Bsky. (here: https://youtu.be/xxgeBZfhAhs)
That’s it for This Week!
Recently Arcy finished up the massive refactor of the weapons, and I plan to start on a hub world soon! Look forward to that!