Aloha!
With the first week winding down I’ve reached the part of the course where the project begins to all come together and then the project moves on to polishing and deployment. where I last left off yesterday the enemies were given the ability to explode and the foundations were being made for an asteroid asset that would act as the trigger that would cause the enemies to start spawning. Today the asset was finished and I moved on to further developing the vfx of the game to give the game a more complete look and provide more emphasis on the execution of mechanics.
Some of these additions involved giving the player ship an animating thruster to add to the feeling of movement. Additionally the player ship will now start displaying two sprites that are animations of trailing smoke to provide a secondary visual representation of the state of the damage taken to the player alongside the life counter in the UI. To meet a challenge presented by the course I was able to get these sprites to display in a random order every time as opposed to a hard coded behavior such as on the first hit the player takes always activating the smoke trail on the left side of the ship and the second hit always activating the one on the right. The randomization helps the animations feel a bit more dynamic albeit in a very minor way.
To reduce the passivity of the enemies a rework had to be done to how the script for the logic of the laser objects to allow the enemies to fire back at the player. the rework involved allowing the laser script to know whether it was called by the player or by the enemy and adjust its behavior accordingly. If it was fired by the player it would fire a laser to the top of the screen and only damage non-player entities. If the laser was fired by the enemy it would fire two lasers to the bottom of the screen and would only damage the player character.
A section of the course that was very informative to me was the portion where we worked on controlling the audio of the game to add music and sound effects to the game. This involved setting up audio controllers for the various objects such as the enemies, asteroid, lasers, and power ups as well as a global object that would handle the music. While I have worked in programming applications in Unity in the past most of my work was on the visual and player interaction side of things and less on the audio side of production. I feel that this was a good introduction to these concepts to start with and expand on down the road.
With all of these aspects implemented all that was left to do is some polishing of various parts of the script logic and then create a demo build for the game that can be played outside of the Unity editor! While this is technically the first completed build of the game there is still much more that can be added to the mechanics as well as some other parts to tune up and polish. Any major changes I make will be documented here. In the meantime here’s a video of the completed 1.0 version of the game!
