AAAAAAAAAA!!!

A little overdramatic, but I think it gets the point across. Our main announcement this time around is: We have sounds! And several of them! After getting the FMOD integration set up, and had beaten a rudimentary understanding of its workflow into my brain, the next thing to do was to start working on sound effects. I'm no sound designer, so I won't say it's well put together, but at least it's not worse than total silence. I hope.

More generally, player feedback was one of the biggest things lacking in previous builds, so that became the key focus for this past week. Beyond just sounds, I also added some visual effects and physics reactions to provide better indications on when things actually had effects on other things. This is burying the lede somewhat because it means that I had to make the secondary abilities actually do something to distinguish their effects.

Under the hood, all of this was dependent on using an event system to communicate... well, events, as they occurred between components and entities at runtime. I was facing some limitations as I tried to have certain objects persist between scene loads and reloads, so I decided to use Unity's ScriptableObjects as the basis for this system, which was a whole thing unto itself. Have I made things any better (or worse) than using the basic UnityEvents that were already there? Who can say!

Here's the changelog:

• Sound effects for:
  • Bazooka weapons: Single Shot, Shotgun, and Grenade (now with explosions!)
  • Player abilities: Dash, Smash, and Teleport (now with more zipzap!)
  • Charger and Ranger attacks
  • Hit grunts and death screams for entities
  • Mouse-over and click events for menu cards
• Entities flash briefly when hit
• Changed rigidbody physics to use applied forces (probably still some left)
• Dash ability causes knockback, damage, stun, and grants brief invulnerability
• Smash ability causes knockback, damage, and stun
• Teleport ability actually teleports
• Touched the weapon and ability card animations
• Updated the "Waves" UI element to use nicer font (and a skull!)

And just for fun, here's just a few of the bugs I found, caused, and hopefully fixed:

• Bullets no longer hurt you before they shoot (explosions do, though)
• Bullets return to full speed after being fired during time slowdown
• Player doesn't teleport through the floor
• Ranger no longer runs backwards
• Music doesn't start playing over itself
• Shotgun no longer fires grenades (sorry)

After a few sluggish weeks of just figuring things out, it feels good to start getting into the actual game design part of the development. There's still a lot to be done as far as readability and UX, but the pile grows smaller every week.

--Jose