About the game

Hi everyone, my name is Rafael and I’m currently working in a game called “The Adventures of the Lone Bounty Hunter”. This game is a top-down shooter roguelike in which you play as a bounty hunter during the wild west, your sole objective is to collect as much bounty as you can. I started the development in November last year for a game jam but wasn’t able to finish in time because I hit a roadblock related to the enemy AI, more specifically the pathfinding. Basically, I wanted to do more than I could at the time in the game jam time frame.

Map Generation

As I studied pathfinding, I focused on the development of another important aspect of the game, the map generation. The game map is divided into 3 sections: start, middle and finish. Each section is divided into what I call rooms. The start and finish section can only have one room, the start room is where the player, you guessed it, start the game, and the finish room is where the player will have to fight the boss. The middle section can have as many rooms as needed for gameplay. 

AI Pathfinding

When I had the idea for the game during the game jam I didn’t consider pathfinding, and as I started the development in Unity I found that the engine doesn’t have a 2d pathfinding solution, at the time I couldn’t use someone else code because of the jam nor I knew how to code myself. If I wasn’t going to finish the game for the game jam, why didn’t I use someone else solution you may ask. Well, I want to learn, and that’s what I did in the following months. Now I have a piece of new knowledge and the AI can find their way in the maps of my game. Although it is still necessary to optimize, for now, is good enough.

Hi! I’m back for a quick update. Since my first post, The Adventures of the Lone Bounty Hunter got a little more dangerous as I spent some time working on the enemies’ AI and in a weapon system.

The AI is using a very simple Finite State Machine. The enemies will wander in an area around the spawn point until the player gets in range, at this time the enemy will move towards the player and if it gets the change it will attack. As is expected there’re still a few bugs and balancing issues.

As for the weapon system, it allows me to spawn any number of projectiles at an angle aiming for the mouse direction. I spent a fair bit of time trying to figure out how to do this. For anyone that knows math, it’s not something hard, but I don’t know math, so its was a fun challenge. Right now the ammo is infinity, just needing to reload after a few shots, but it will change to only allowing the player to carry a certain amount of round for each weapon to encourage the player to change the way he/she plays and to have something to spend his/her hard-earned money.

But for now, I think its time to stop coding for a moment and focus a little more on the art side of the game, make a few sound effects, some particles, you know, make everything a little bit nicer.

On a side note, I’m pretty happy about how the game is taking shape, it’s allowing me to put everything that I know in practice and making me learn a lot along the way.