Halo inspired laser tag (LTTO hack)

To try to prepare for ramping up production, I built the next 4 guns as efficiently and uniformly as I could. It went pretty smoothly, and it's really exciting to have 8 guns to test with now. I really hope everything else scales well. I'm mostly concerned with the radio messaging, as that can get congested really quickly. 

By now, I've gotten annoyingly good at laser tag compared to the students who will actually be playing the game, and just like in Halo this can make for a less than fun experience. I've added in a mechanism borrowed from mario kart where if a player falls behind, they get an invisible boost in performance. If they don't have enough kills, their weapons get more powerful. If they've died too many times, their shield gets stronger. It's all proportional and tunable, as they come back to the front they go back to normal.

We play tested last night and the new shotgun works very well. It's very satisfying. It bursts 10 shots in about half a second, and each shot does 34% damage, so landing three or more will get you a one shot kill. during a few firefights I got hit, but not enough to get me fully out - which I think is the sweet spot I want it to be at. I think the burst does make it easier to aim and land a hit. I think I will be expanding this method to both the sniper and the rocket launcher since both of those prove to be more difficult to get kill shots with. 

The shotgun ended up being way too powerful during play. I couldn't figure out a way to get more spread from the transmitting devices available. The dome LEDs weren't bright enough. a single dedicated LED wasn't bright enough. I think this is because the dome receiver has a fixed gain to make the long range barrel LED more selective. But using the radio to transmit shotgun blasts - because it goes everywhere and transmits through walls - it didn't feel like shooting a gun anymore. This method will come back in the form of some other weapon - like a gravity hammer or energy sword. 

So I thought maybe instead of trying to create a real spread, I could simulate a spread. What if the shotgun sent out its IR message repeatedly and very quickly in one burst that would cover the span or two AR shots. That should in theory guarantee that the shotgun can interrupt an AR, and the spread of the shotgun is determined by how much your aim moves after you shoot. I can limit the effective range still by using the radio RSSI messages. On the bench it works, will test soon