Ammo Count

[thombruce]

There is presently no reason for the player not to be constantly firing. There's no challenge and no decision-making involved in when to fire.

There are a couple of ways to address this:

1. Ammo count - force the player to conserve ammo and go in search of resupplies
2. Weapon overheating - force the player to think about when they use their weapon and control their bursts

Note that if we do introduce an ammo count, we do also need to ensure that the player can always resupply... otherwise they're helpless to continue. So while enemies may drop ammo, we do also need another means of supply for the player.

Given the above, weapon overheating might be the simpler idea to implement initially and is likely something that we do want eventually too.

[thombruce]

See also #119

I don't want to overcomplicate the user experience too early, but I do want different weapon types and this raises a question about ammo. Managing different types of ammo is, I think, the sort of overcomplication I'm trying to avoid for now. The way I see the game working by v0.1 is you have one weapon at any time but it can be changed by picking up a power-up; since these weapons differ in damage, cool-down and utility, they logically should have different ammo types but... trying to avoid that. So I suggest having a generic ammo type that they each consume at different rates.

It's kind of ridiculous to think that a ballistic weapon firing bullets should have the same ammo resource as an energy beam weapon, but that might be what we're going with...

It might be best to steer clear of using the word "ammo" then or even "energy" or "weapons resource" and communicate this purely visually. The visual... could also change dependent on weapon type, but they would all be consuming the same underlying number.

Visuals might be things like...

• Fraction of total (e.g. "123 / 400")
• Progress bar
• Individual quanta (like dots or separate icons each representing a single consumable amount)

We also have to wonder about rounding, since if each does consume the resource at different rates the player can easily end up with a fractional amount for a weapon type that is too little to be used. When switching between weapons, do we adjust the number? We could floor, ciel or round to the nearest appropriate value or... simply leave the unconsumable amount in place.

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This is a good example of a system that will behave one way for an early iteration of the game, but is modifiable to be used a wholly different way later on. Any weapon power-ups we introduce now, plus their UI ammo/resource usage representations will remain relevant in later versions of the game that allow multiple weapons to be mounted on a ship, and when these weapons are not picked up as power-ups but instead purchased at shipyards.