Ideas take time to translate well to code

Dev name: Alexander Capó

In this post, I will be talking about one of my biggest issues that I usually encounter when writing the gameplay logic for this game, as well as any project that I work on: taking an idea and somehow making it work in code. It is mostly a me problem, but every now and then, I have to step back from programming to figure out how I am going to bring a function to life. Its easy to think that, for example, getting onto a car in GTA is as easy as changing the player character's control scheme, which could work. Being the gameplay developer, I was tasked with creating a system where the player can switch back and forth between the player character and a stationary sentry gun. There were many ideas going through my head, I discussed with my team on what would a good way to complete this task, with different responses. And this was only for the sentry weapon, pickups work as intended.

So how did I fix my problem? Luckily, there was one solution that crossed my mind multiple times. Since the sentry would have its own control scheme that shared some similarity with the player class, I thought of creating two playable character classes, and when the player gets close enough and interacts with the gun, the player controller would possess the sentry gun, and vice versa. This thought process did confuse my team a bit, and implementing the logic took a lot of debugging, but as of now, the player can switch between the character and the sentry whenever. Now I just need to implement the weapon's logic.