Day 16 The Boss of Bosses. Well, that about wraps up Phase 2 and…
By: Mark Bohuslav
Tags: Unity, Game Design, Game Development, Unity Game Development

Well, that about wraps up Phase 2 and the Space Shooter 2D. I ended up having to spend some time on Sunday to finish up since I did not quite get done on Friday. I went a bit crazy on the boss scene and had some fun with it while implementing some new techniques.

The Boss scene has 3 stages:

The Grand Entrance where the music changes and he comes down like a Big Diva with his Minions in formation. He has a shield with 10hp and the boss has 20hp & animated lasers. I learned how to animate from watching Al’s last 2 meetings, the last one this past Friday was very helpful. The Spawned fighter will charge aggressively towards the player and the Boss moves in a modified combo Sin/Cos wave.

The Second stage happens when the Boss shields get vaporized, 6 more Spawned fighters show up to join the fight.

Stage 3 occurs when the boss goes down to 10 hp. Two Arm extensions fly in and attach to his body so now he shoots 4 lasers instead of just two. The Boss has BoxCasting on him to fire when he detects the player. At some point when I revisit the project I may add individual ray casting on each arm of the boss so that not all the lasers fire at the same time. I did also animate the lasers for extra effect.

Additionally, the boss has different impact zones across his body. He has a total of 8 colliders in different areas each spawning its own localized explosion when hit. Also created a staged Ship destructing at the end for maximum impact.

Overall I am happy with how the visuals turned out. Sometimes the game runs real smooth but sometimes there is some random teleporting during this scene which I need to investigate.

The constant sound clipping is very annoying as well. Apparently the max volume for Unity is 1 (0 to 1 being the range) so that if your .Wav files at any point total more than 1 then clipping occurs. I tried to lower the volume on everything to get rid of it but I just have a lot of sounds going on. I need to investigate if there are plug-ins that can be installed to address this very very limiting factor of the current package.

All that being said, its a fun and crazy scene. Check it out on YouTube:

In Case you are wondering. I gave myself some Immunity from Damage, otherwise I would be toast!

I spent a good bit of time getting the sprites to look the way I wanted and animating them too. It was a great learning experience. My code got intense too and had to figure out a lot of out of the box solutions. Since the End Sequence had a lot of moving parts and a lot of elements needed to be timed and choreographed. I started to get tired and rush a bit at the end so I am sure my Code looks like a big plate of spaghetti with all the If statements and Bools. I’ll go back and clean it up when I am rested. Either way I am glad the Space Shooter is done as I am ready to just focus on C# and strictly doing training exercises in Unity to fill my knowledge gaps. That’s my plan this week before diving into the Cinematography. Eventually I also want to continue progressing my animation skills as that is an area that I really enjoy. I am very excited to play around in 3D, Al’s last video got me super excited!

Mahalo!