Ninja Update: New Weapon System! (Patreon)

The power-up/weapon system is finally done!! As it was supposed to be last week! Let's talk about it!

So in the original plan for the game, there were supposed to be two power-ups: a shotgun and a lightning power. The shotgun would be able to destroy the stones (which were furniture at the time) from which enemies appear. The lightning power would just kill all the enemies when you use it.

The reason I completely ditched those power-ups is that both of them would require animations at a pretty big scale! You know me, big scale animation is really not my thing and it usually ends up taking a lot of my time to get right. Naturally, I thought "let's not do that".

So instead, I thought up a system that would use the animations that were already there! A system where each of the power-ups would just need three different sprites and then the rest is all scripts! A weapon system!

On enemy wave 2 and then once every three waves, a special enemy will appear in the background. You don't have to kill it to advance in the game, but if you do, you get a random weapon from the five available. (other than the ninja stars) That weapon will show up on a button on the border of the screen just above the regular controls, press that button and you now have that weapon in hand for a limited amount of time, shown where that button was.

The five weapons are:

• marbles (spread shots)
• bullets (quick and +damage)
• throwing knives (+damage and bigger hitbox)
• money (thanks for the inspiration Paul)
• a genie lamp

Even though some weapons are more powerful than others, they can all be considered better than the basic ninja stars and they will definitely help you on higher waves. (and higher difficulties, coming soon) And hopefully they will make each playthrough more unique and interesting!

There's still some balancing to do but overall it's fairly well implemented if I say so myself! And that's a good thing too because there's not a lot of time left to finish this game!

With that done, UI becomes the priority! There's a few menus to do, I gotta work on the score display and make a game over screen. I also have to make the point system, where you gain points from playing the game and then you can unlock visual styles with them! And I said I'd do a procedural quest system, that's still planned as well!

Here are some tiny mock-ups for the different screens. I actually make a lot of those when I implement stuff, it's a huge help on planning ahead!

Wish me luck to make all this happen quickly!

Thanks for reading!

Have a nice week-end!