Bullets are probably the most important element of gameplay, so it’s important to have a lot of options in place to give us the most versatility possible.

Acceleration#

Probably my favourite mechanic out of these, acceleration lends it’s way to things like lingering bullets or bullets that effectively shoot with a delay.

We want a few parameters:

• Acceleration delay: lets us delay the acceleration
• Acceleration rate: how much the bullet accelerates in tiles/second^2
• Acceleration limit: min/max speed, eg. 0 to stop the bullet and prevent it goign backwards.

Curve#

Changing the bullet’s direction after it’s been fired opens up very interesting patterns, and is something I don’t think is used quite enough in these kind of games.

Every update interval (each frame or a coroutine), we get the angle of the bullet’s velocity, adjust it and set the velocity back.

Area of Effect (AoE) projectiles#

A completely different type of projectile, one that flies over the ground and deals area damage when it lands.

Visual effects#

I’ve also added a few purely visual mechanics. Right now these are:

• Sprite rotation
• Spawn & Despawn animations
  • Fade in/out
  • Scale up/down

and I will probably add more later.