Shooting Functionality

The shooting functionality in our project was designed to be simple but scalable. Basically the shoot function involves a countdown timer to create a delay between shots, and this timer must reach 0 in order to fire again. This is set up with variables to allow further manipulation at runtime. In the future I would like to implement some system for player progression that would allow players to shoot more quickly as the game progresses and they acquire the necessary upgrades. After the delay timer reaches 0 and the player fires again, a projectile is creating at the designated shoot point and is applied with a force to shoot it forward. This method was directly ripped from our Unit 3 class project, as it works great and is simple to implement. Aside from the one bug mentioned in the Pause Menu dev log, there were no issues.

I had initially planned to have some sort of system set up that would cast a ray when the player shot, allowing the projectile to travel along a predetermined path until collision. This method would have taken some of the visual jankiness out of the way the projectile traveled, at the expense of realistic gravity application to the projectile. I chose the physics based movement primarily because it was easier and less time consuming to implement, and that is the method that is in our final submission, but I may experiment with other ideas in the future.

-Griffin