Aerosub 2024-07-31 - splashes and fish

Long time since last update.  I won't be updating as often in the future, and today's update is small.

SPLASHES

Some (well, all) projectiles will be stopped when they hit the water.  This is aesthetically fun but also serves to separate the player's focus on air or water in the future.   "Should I focus defenses on air or sea?"  and such.  However, it does introduce some problems, to be addressed in the future, but likely not soon:

• Some splash sprites are misaligned to where they should be.
• Color doesn't match the water, and will need to be adjusted for day/night.
• Length of animation is too long, the animations seem to run 1 1/4 times.
• Size is not proportional to the thing dropping onto the water.  A piece of iron, for example, should probably cause a smaller splash than the aerosub.
• The player can too easily use the surface of the water as a shield, by diving underwater at the last moment to escape being hit.  I'd like to address this by allowing projectiles to go a little bit into the water: far enough that they player can't just dive to dodge, but shallow enough that the player will be safe if they were already underwater before.
• Gameplay concerns around: now there's even less reason ever to go underwater.  The player can't shoot, enemies can't shoot, and there's nothing to do yet. (except collect from the ocean floor).  Going to need dedicated underwater weapons and enemies, and/or certain weapons/enemies that can do both.  In Aquatron (1983), submarines would shoot projectiles from underwater into the air, so that might be a starting point.

FISH

I continued to procrastinate on the "the player needs a reason to go undewater" problem, which is critical for the full game loop.  But I wanted a simple way to make underwater less boring.  So, fish.

There are fish. They are so stupid, but there are fish. They do vary in some minimal ways:

• Animation speed
• Scale
• Swim speed (per school)
• School position has slight variation.

There are multiple, increasingly complex ways to make them more lifelike:

• Their speed doesn't vary. Simplest solution would be to have them waver up and down linearly around a base speed so the base speed is still their average velocity.
  • Harder: Swish: faster animation and velocity, slow down, slower animation and velocity, then swish again.
• Their direction is strictly left or right. They could curve up and down along a base path.
  • Harder: follow the curve of a sine wave with a crest at sea level and a trench at the bottom of the sea. Variable period.
• The fish SCALE IS NOT CORRECT at all. The "big" fish look like they could eat the ærosub. When at the same parallax level as the ærosub, most fish should be tiny.

Followed by somewhat harder possibilities:

• Fish are not afraid of the ærosub or enemies at all. They should run away when the player is too close, if they are on the same (or nearby) parallax.  See Dave The Diver (2023) for examples of fish being scared of people.
• Certain events should scare fish even more, such as:
  • Player splashes in the water.
  • Shots fired underwater, or explosions/hits underwater, or splashes on the surface from ordnance.
• Fish are not following other fish, as would normally be done in a school of fish. They are all just traveling in one direction. More complex flocking behavior is possible.
• Fish serve no purpose other than visual. Should player be able to harvest them for resources? Maybe. If so, it's even more important that they be afraid of the player.
• Fish schools are planar - there's no parallax. Some should be NEAR and some should be FAR!  I considered hiring this expert consultant to help with the math on the sizes of NEAR and FAR fish:

That's all for now.  Don't know when the next update will be, or if anyone is reading, but I appreciate your feedback and suggestions!