Day 10 with GameDevHQ
“You’re all clear kid. Now let’s blow this thing and go home!” -Han Solo Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope
We all remember the space battle scene in “A New Hope” when the rebel ships approach the “Death Star” with hope to destroy it. We know the story, but let us take a moment to appreciate the visual effects; specifically, the explosions! Today we started our visual effects portion of the curriculum with the most satisfying, “Enemy Explosion”. The animation put together by Al and Jonathan was impressive, and really made our game visually stimulating. Before our enemies would just disappear as quickly as they come onto the screen. Now, they go off with a bang!
Next thing, we started working on this concept of having an asteroid, floating around in space, harming nobody, to be destroyed in order to start the wave of enemies. We added an explosion affect for the asteroid slightly differently from our “enemy” prefab. This time, we simply destroyed from the scene, then an explosion effect to follow. It does make me wonder what it takes to make these animations. “What program was used? What tools were used to create this list of sprites? How long did it take?”, I pondered this to myself. I imagine that will be a lesson for the future, and sometimes its best not to wonder, and stray too far from our focus here.
Going back to Star Wars, another impressive visual were the thrusters. Each “X-Wing” had 4 thrusters on each ship. Each glowing with intensity as they visualize traveling through space towards a planet sized space-station. We too, wanted thrusters as a visual for our game. We positioned the thrusters at the tail end of our player and gave it an animation. Now we have the appearance that our ship is being thrusted forward. However, I find it a little bland as the size always remains the same. I would like to code the thrusters to get larger when we move forward, and smaller when we move backwards. I’m hoping to also create movement in the background, so it appears we’re constantly traveling forwards through space. When it comes to it, I would like a final boss to be large and immobile, but powerful. Well now that we’re getting to the end of the lessons; I’m excited to start focusing on making this game into my own.
All in all, I am enjoying these lessons and find the challenges difficult, but within my ability to figure out. I was not successful on all the challenges, but at least I was going in the right direction. I did dabble with the post processing portion as well. My explosions now look super cool but have this odd dark box around them; making the explosions look awkward. I did scope out the next couple lessons and saw the “enemy explosion bug fix”. I am hoping that we will address this in that lesson.
Until then, “May the force be with you”.
