Hey guys, sorry for the lack of updates lately. Work got in the way and I didn't have much time to work on Super Trickshot. But I'm back with a first look at the first level of the game and some insights I gained when attempting to program a physics based target trajectory line for the player character (pictured below)
That rainbow coloured line indicates the path the player will take when they shoot the player character. Since enemies in Super Trickshot move around a lot I thought it would be helpful to know where your shot will travel in advance. Little did I know how much of a headache this feature would prove to be!
I first tried by simply drawing a line in the direction the player character was facing, and reflecting the angle whenever they hit a barrier. This proved inaccurate though and after some investigation I found that I wasn't accounting for forces such as velocity and friction, which would change the angle the player character would bounce off at.
So my second plan was to use a built in Unity feature to simulate the physics ahead of time but this proved to be surprisingly CPU intensive, too much so in fact.
Finally I decided to solve the problem in reverse. Instead of trying to predict the trajectory of the character, I would move the character along the trajectory line. That way I could return to the simple implementation of my first idea. This worked surprisingly well and it's the solution I'm going to go with moving forward. of course, from the player's perspective they will be unable to tell the difference.
Sorry again for the lack of updates and going over the month time limit. Turns out making games is herd! But I'll try to keep you guys in the know more going forward.