I have now added weapons to the characters. The Simple Military pack has a variety of weapons, but at this stage, I've assigned a 'modern assault rifle' for the 'good guys', and a AK47 for the 'bad guys'.
I also added a muzzle flash when the gun shoots (it shows for just a fraction of a second).
Next I will add projectiles and add back in the destructive environment that I started with, all those years ago.
Next I've been working on implementing more of the game, which is a big departure of most of my posts, where I've been working on game mechanics, usually in isolation. I'm calling this the "player state diagram". You can see this represented in a state diagram below. Also encased in the diagram is a road map of the features I've implemented and what I plan to implement next.
When a player has finished all of their moves, it switches to the enemy turn, where the (overly simplified AI) decides to just pass ("Patrol"), and switch back to the player. Since the player still can't attack, I think this is fair.
Next we need to add AI to the player to move into cover and shooting between the two teams...
In my last update I showed a screenshot with a soldier in cover. In this latest update, I've added an enemy and added the code that marks the players as in cover or being flanked/out of cover.
Here my player is in cover (the enemy has a lower chance of hitting the player and dealing damage):
Here my player is flanked and not in cover (the enemy has a much higher chance of hitting the player and dealing critical damage):
There was actually quite a lot of rework involved in the code and corresponding systems to get the enemy soldier to (re-)appear and have everything work. The next update will be even more involved as I refactor the code into more systems and add more players and enemies - adding turns that switch back and forth after movement.
Two years can really fly by. Growing families, big work projects, small home projects, and as many distractions as you can throw at a sticky wall, here I am. I haven't been doing nothing, I just haven't been writing about it. I'm trying to change the not writing about things problem today.
One of those mini projects I've been working on is very relevant for this project. About a year and a half ago, I started a GitHub project I've called OpenTile. OpenTile is an opensource solution to create the building blocks and data structures for a tile based game. There is no UI, apart from the ASCII files, but it's being built in C#, with a branch for Unity3d. There is currently functionality for basic path finding, possible available tiles (for movement), cover, as well as a number of utility functions.
I've found this framework really helpful for building a game. I'm able to focus on fundamental functionality such as path finding or cover in a simple ASCII UI, and then it's much easier to integrate the changes into a full 3d engine - with the confidence that it works.
In the screenshots below you can see two simple examples that show the output of path finding on a large map with varied obstacles.
In Unity3D, this is what the result looks like on a small test map:
