☢️ Devlog #4 — Radioactive Horrors Unleashed

Welcome to another scorching update from the pixelated apocalypse that is Contagion Protocol — our zombie-infested bullet-hell roguelite built with pure grit, heavy metal, and caffeine. This month, the horde mutated. Let’s break it down.

🧟‍♂️ New Enemy Type: Radioactive Zombie They don’t just bite — they spit.

• Ranged Acid Attacks: These green-glowing freaks stay at a distance and fire toxic projectiles toward the player.

• Projectile Logic: Acid orbs deal damage, glow with animated FX, and destroy themselves after a short lifespan.

• AdjustedDirectional AIEnemies now rotate and face the player correctly, with idle animations updated to avoid twitching.

• Fully Integrated: These spitters are bombable, freezable, knockback-able, and death-animatable, thanks to full IDamageable support.

• Visuals: AcidFX on death. Glowing toxic puke when they go down. ☠️

🧪 Boss Encounter: The Radioactive Nightmare The first real boss has arrived — and it's dripping with bile.

• Multi-phase Behavior: Uses custom RadioactiveBossAI.cs for complex attacks.

• Acid Spit Attack: Instantiates a spitting projectile that leaves behind a damage-over-time acid puddle.

• Animation Precision: Boss flip direction and FX spawn points dynamically adjust based on movement direction.

• Pooling-Ready: Every acid puddle, spit FX, and blood spray is optimized to avoid runtime lag.

• Currently Static Spawn: Boss doesn’t spawn from the usual system — it’s manually placed for testing (expect spawning upgrades soon).

⚠️ Debugging the Apocalypse A month of hard bug-smashing and polish.

🛠️ Projectile Direction Fixes: Acid orbs now fly correctly — no more frozen fireballs hanging in mid-air.

🔧 Animator Fixes: Added missing idle directions to avoid twitch loops.

💥 FX Cleanup: Blood and acid FX properly despawn and pool without memory leaks.

🔁 Interface Consistency: IDamageable and IFreezable logic now fully respected across all enemy types.

✅ Flip Logic Refactor: SpriteRenderer flipX is now used instead of localScale — better visuals and less jank.

📈 Architecture Deep Dive for all you Nerds Because systems should scale — not break.

• Modular Boss AI: Uses a clean SpawnAcidSpit() pipeline, including prefab offsets and visual sync.

• Prefab Hierarchies: All visual elements are children under empty GameObjects for clean separation (Collider, FX, Visuals).

• Animator Best Practices: Every state (Idle, Attack, Death) now exists in 8 directions. No more “Missing State” spam.

• Spawner System Extension: Acid zombies are now injected into waves after 4 minutes. Boss spawning still manual for now.

🛠️ What’s Coming Next The cauldron still boils.

🌪️ Add Boss Spawner Logic to the zombie wave system.

☣️ Polish acid puddle FX with screen shake and damage ticks.

🔥 Implement Projectile Variants (spread, spores, etc).

🧠 Build out a RangedZombieAI base class for cleaner code reuse.

🧩 Finalize Boss Attacks 2, 3 & 4: Skull pulse and poison nova, as well as pulsing cicular acid balls

💾 Integrate proper pooling for all boss FX and attacks.

🙌 Thank You for the Support

Every wishlist, follow, and comment makes this game crawl closer to the surface.

Contagion Protocol is made with love, obsession, and late-night debugging sessions. There’s no studio. No funding. Just one dev and a dream to make something sick, stylish, and brutally fun.

If you’re vibing with this journey:

🖤 Wishlist the game 📢 Follow for more 🎤 Drop a comment — your feedback fuels this fire

Until next time, stay radioactive. 🤘

– Para82