How would I make a shotgun scatter bullets in Godot?

Question

Hey guys, I'm trying to make a 2D shooter and want to implement a simple shotgun. Unluckily I have found no one online that has posted how they have done it.

I already have my shotgun sprite as a child of my player and I have it point towards my mouse.

https://gyazo.com/50155a4c304741132103e0f680602056

How do I make my bullet sprite come out of the shotgun in a spread? Do I use raycasts to do this? I have a sprite for the bullet already. I'm very new to coding and Godot so I apologize if this is a dumb question.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Do I use raycasts to do this?

Raycasts are used to check for collisions in a straight (and potentially very long) line. They can figure out the target of an instant-hit-weapon, but won't help here.

All you need to to do is spawn multiple instances of your bullet-scene in the same location, change their rotation and then let them all travel in a straight line.

1) Create a bullet-scene, for simplicity I'll simply assume a Sprite:

extends Sprite

var direction = Vector2(1, 0)
var speed = 400 # pixels / s

func _ready():
    set_as_toplevel(true)

func _physics_process(delta):
    global_position += direction * speed * delta

2) Create a player scene. For simplicity I'll again assume a Sprite. Once the player hits the right key, we need to call a shoot-method to spawn the bullets:

extends Sprite

const BULLET_SCENE = preload("res://Bullet.tscn")

var aim_direction = Vector2.RIGHT

func _input(event):
    if event is InputEventKey and event.pressed:
        if event.scancode == KEY_SPACE:
            shoot()

3) Also we need to ake the aim direction controllable with the mouse:

func _process(delta):
    aim_direction = global_position.direction_to(get_global_mouse_position())

4) Now we've everything we need to implement the shoot-method itself:

func shoot():       
    for angle in [-45, -22.5, 0, 22.5, 45]:
        var radians = deg2rad(angle)
        var bullet = BULLET_SCENE.instance()
        bullet.direction = aim_direction.rotated(radians)
    bullet.global_position = self.global_position
        add_child(bullet)