Hey there!
For February work was done on changing the camera view in BRS and Dosero is being updated to reflect the story better. For the FPS project, reward chests were added, a new enemy type was introduced, and there are now explosions!
So for Bright Red Skies, the camera was updated from being an arrangement of static cameras to being attached to your character directly. This was a relatively quick update to make there were two main reasons for why this was done. The first is because I think it visually looks a lot better seeing everything much closer haha. The second is because it's not a bird's eye view so fewer objects need to get rendered which will be nice for the performance. Running around the new map I'm getting 600-800 fps compared to the ~150 fps on the previous version. The new map isn't fully complete but those numbers are still nice.
As mentioned, Dosero is getting an update, mostly to add a bigger area for the school and command center. The town is pretty small having only five main areas: homes, shop district, school, command center, and a shooting range. Some of the areas still need to be filled out and NPCs need to get added so I want to add those in some time this month.
For the FPS project, I'm also making I added in some reward chests. There are two types of chests right now, a general chest and a weapon crate. The weapon crate gives a weapon as you would expect, and the general chest drops credits, experience, and low-tier items. Someone told me the drops remind them of Kingdom Hearts items and now I can't unsee it, but it's probably just going to stay like that. ;)
The final thing I did for February, was add some turrets and explosions. I want to try and get something out to test as soon as possible, so when I make the enemies they're all the ones you'd see in the early game. Turrets are a pretty good early game enemy since they're immobile, so I went with implementing them. Thought it would be interesting to add some homing missiles to one of the turret variants, so you can see me shooting down some incoming missiles in the clip below:
Think I'm getting closer to a 70/30 split of my free time when balancing the development of these two games. It's been two months of development on the FPS project and I think progress is decent but the 6-month mark is when I'm going to need to evaluate if making two games at the same time is possible and if the FPS game is even worth pursuing further. I'm a big fan of both JRPGs and FPSs so I personally like the idea of an FPS with a sprinkle of JRPG, but we'll see how it goes. For March here's what I'd like to get done:
Bright Red Skies:
- Clean up project, get reacclimated to the code
- Finish Dosero, adding in shops and town NPCs
FPS:
- Controller support
- Fix some issues with AI pathing
- Weapon menu in the player UI
- Come up with a name (?!)
Anyways, thanks for making it to the end of the devlog! I'll see you guys again next month! :D