Happy New Year,
Spent most of my time over the last few weeks improving how the gun handles for the player. I created animations for what the gun does when the player is reloading or running. At first I was worried that I wasn't going to be able to make compelling animations, but I found that it's pretty easy to get a simple reload or "weapon bob" animation created, and I'm pretty pleased with the results.
The running and reloading are done with animations, but I decided that for the player "lowering his gun" when approaching a wall, I would instead lerp the rotation of the weapon. I used a great tutorial by BuffaLou as a starting point, and I was able to make the adjustments needed to fit my vision for this game. Between these different animations and mechanisms, it took me a good bit of thinking to figure out how to properly trigger each one - i.e. handling things like "you shouldn't be able to shoot while near a wall" and "you should cancel your reload if you start running during the animation". I'm pretty happy with where it's at now, and I think I've laid solid groundwork to move on to other parts of the game.
Speaking of other parts, I have a shootable NPC in my game, which I got from the Low Poly Animated People pack by polyperfect . As you can see below, you can now shoot and kill Santa in my video game. I plan on building on this affront to Christmas by playing around with the other characters in this pack, and hopefully will get some basic enemies and levels designed soon.
Stay tuned!
--Josh