Day 8– Phase One nearing completion!
Aloha everybody. Today I worked on adding Two new Powerups. One for Health and one for AMMO. The Health Powerup increases the players life by 1 and the Ammo powerup replenishes the player Ammo to full. In addition to the Ammo powerup I also created an ammo regeneration system for the lasers to slowly increase over time so the player wasn’t just reliant on Powerups. I used Time.time + a regeneration rate of 1 ammo every 2 seconds and it works pretty well. I also decided to change how my Shield powerup works. Instead of the strength increasing by 1 each time I get a Shield powerup with visual changes graduating to the higher level each time I collect more. I decided to have the shields start at full power ( brightest shield) upon collection and lose power as you get hit. The shield gets darker and more blue and is destroyed after 3 hits unless another powerup is collected.
I spent some more time in GIMP; I played around with some of my sprites and created new ones. I guess its the same thing as Blender and I will probably check out BLENDER as well since that is the one people seem to use the most. I was able to make some simple animations for the Ammo and Health Powerups. I also modified the thruster engine Sprite and used it in my UI under my lives to indicate my thruster fuel level. I stretched the image using the transform in the inspector and then in my UI script I used recTransform.LocalScale to reduce the length of the sprite using my depletionRate * Time.deltaTime whenever I held the LeftShift key. (see below code) I also added a very very slow recharge rate when the thrusters are not being used and also a 5 second cooldown if the thrusters hit zero. After the cooldown the thrusters recharge very quickly to full. It looks great and is very fluid on screen. I also controlled and sent instructions to the Player script from the UI to let the Player know when the thrusters should be active so it slows down when the sprite image x-axis hits 0. This way my UI image and the player actions all sync up nicely.
In addition to that I added a visual effect for when the thrusters are in use. Basically made the thruster flame longer when the Shift key is pressed or the SPEED Powerup is picked up. It looks cool and was fairly simple to do using the transform. All I had to do was make a copy of the thruster sprites in explorer, renamed them and put them in a new sprite folder and voila.
Overall was a very productive day. Tomorrow I will focus on the Camera Shake and the Special Weapon powerup and maybe add a sound effect when the Thrusters recharge after the cooldown. if I have time I might take a crack at Phase 2 depending how things go. Overall very happy with my progress, I have learned a lot in such a short period of time and the game is looking better every day!
