Day 15 — They say that the best weapon is the one that you never have to fire. I respectfully disagree.
By: Mark Bohuslav
Tags: Unity, Game Design, C Sharp Programming, Game Development

For your Consideration…..The Jericho!

Aloha Team, I am very excited to present my player’s super weapon. I worked on it for the better part of the day. It is my very own Jericho. For starters, It’s basically an EMP style weapon and tried to match the animations and sound to reflect this. I had to get the animation just right and that took a while finding the right sprites, changing colors, sizes and the timing. I added an additional electrical burst animation during the wind up time of the weapon. I also had to find the right sound, edit and clean it up. I decided to code the weapon to my Z key as the Alt was used by Unity. I may change it before creating an Executable. Here are the basic features of the weapon. It will destroy all enemies within range. The circular collider starts at 0 and the radius increases gradually as the animation increases so as to destroy enemies closer to you first and gradually move outwards from the player to destroy the rest.

When used on my Elite unit it will bring him down to 1 hp and he will flash red until he dies by the next shot. Additionally for a cool effect I slowed time for everybody to half speed during the wind up as the weapon prepares to activate. This adds an awesome effect as it looks like everybody is drifting in slow motion right before the Boom! Just like in the movies!

TO do this is very simple. You just have to reduce the Timescale. For example:

Time.timeScale =0.5f will reduce the speed to 50%. Timescale range is from 0 to 1. That’s it! I also programmed to wipe out the players shields if he has any when using the weapon. The Level 3 shield will reduce down to a Level 1 gradually and then the shield disappears as the weapon fires. The weapon is on a cooldown and I made a small animation next to my Ammo Indicator to indicate if the weapon is available again for use. I may also add a sound effect when the weapon comes back online. The player also gains immunity for about 3/4 of a second while the weapon is activating.

I spent a lot of time blowing stuff up with the weapon to test out how responsive it was and how in sync the explosions, audio and visuals were. Of course that is my excuse for just blowing stuff up!!!

I spent a lot of time on this and did not get to working on the Boss until later in the day. So while I thought I would finish the Space Shooter today, I will end up finishing tomorrow and then I’ll take the weekend to just review and clean up. I have big plans for the Boss and its going to pretty much take me most of the day to finish him and the fight sequence. So far I have gotten his Ship image ready to go with thrusters, I worked on his shield animation. I had to modify each of the 16 sprite pngs for the animated shields outside of Unity since the Color changing tools are not that great compared to GIMP. I also painstakingly created his minions. I basically modeled the spawned ships after the cylon ships. Found some art online, converted it to a PNG to get rid of the background and cleaned it up pixel by pixel and changed the color scheme around to match the MotherShip. Overall its looking good and I can’t wait to create the Battle Sequence!

Here is quick taste of what the visuals will entail with the Mothership:

ruhRoh!………Gulp………

Making Games Rocks!!!!!!