Stagger and Melee Scrapping

The goal of 0.3.0 was reaching a core gameplay loop. It introduces new robot behaviors, a fist melee weapon, and scrapping to restore hit points and ammo. Please note this is just a prototype and the eventual gameplay may differ.

Similar to Doom Eternal, damaging a robot enough causes it to stagger. When staggering, you can close in and strike it (with offhand fist via 'Q') to instantly scrap the robot, randomly releasing ammo or scrap that repairs you (yes, the player is a robot too!). For these features I needed to add animations, an offhand inventory slot, held item rendering, and item dropping/collection. Quick slots are also added but not used yet.

With the addition of drops, the game now has a basic core gameplay loop where the player destroys robots or scraps them to regain resources, repeating as the difficulty increases. My plan is to start by experimenting with combat gameplay like this, then progress to world generation, simulation, and building mechanics to add more variety to the core experience.

A good portion of the development time was spent on an internal rework of physics to support upcoming features. For now, the only sign of the change is enemy robots falling more naturally when terrain is destroyed (rather than following precalculated linear trajectories as before).

Steering behaviors also have some minor improvements, but at this point steering is only really used to prevent robots from getting too close to each other. The steering logic can support thousands of robots without breaking a sweat, but it turns out the movement and collision logic becomes a bottleneck at that scale.

Next up will probably be more combat gameplay and refinement along with some related building features. World generation will need to wait until the current cavern area is fun and diverse enough by itself.

New:

• Melee enemy
• Flying enemy
• Fist offhand weapon (Q)
• Enemies stagger on low HP
• Scrap and ammo drops
• Jumping now limited
• Line-of-sight targeting check
• Vertical camera smoothing
• Show held items with fixed FOV
• Quick slots in HUD
• Reworked physics
• Basic animations
• Screen capture (F2)

Known issues:

• Internal sync issues occasionally causing robots to appear destroyed but then reappear
• Sometimes flyers get stuck in the ceiling