Secondary Fire - GV

Author: Gabriel Vega-Salcedo

Date: 8/29/2024

Toward the end of our last sprint, our spells could only be used for traversal so my team and I added to the design document to implement a secondary fire similar to Neon White soul cards. (0:42). While implementing the secondary fire during this sprint for the dash, harden, and jump spells was maintaining the balance between all three to ensure no one spell was better than the rest. 

Each spell has its own unique firing ability, like dash shoots the projectile in front of the player while jump shoots projectiles in the air like Cuphead.

The issue that was causing this balancing issue was that fact all the spells had access to the same projectile, which for this build is currently the fireball projectile(only one being in use). Luckily, after further discussing with the team, we came to a more solid understanding of how we want to keep the secondary fire for the spells such as jump; secondary fire only shoots up so it can clear up aerial enemies to be able to use your jump spell (effective against bomber plane variants since once implemented you would be able to destroy the bombs they drop with the projectile). The dash spell due to the way the projectile functions similar to the bouncing of Marios fire ball its a consistent weapon to deal with basic ground enemies. The harden spell causes multiple fireballs to launch from the player in multiple directions but has limited ammunition, so similar to Harden's ability to prevent the player from taking damage, the secondary fire can be used as a last-ditch effort to deal with an obstacle. This improves the end-user experience by adding variety to the game and opening up new possible methods of dealing with puzzles/enemies so that the player wouldn't be stuck with the same version of an attack.