Visual Treats

So as predicted I did have much time the rest of this week to do much work on Project WRA. I got a couple of hours on Friday before training and a couple of hours on Sunday after getting back from being out at the Edinburgh Fringe, but I did make them count. Currently the game is all pretty standard and I am getting along quite well with building it all, but I also have been thinking about how do I polish it up a bit and add a bit extra to whats going on to make it a little more visually entertaining.

We graphics are not my strong point in any way shape or form and I have been trying hard to actually make something that looks not that bad for this game but I wanted to add a little bit more depth to it all so I have been looking at other things I can do. The game is pretty flat at the moment so I decided to play around a little with the camera and add in a shake. This was a bit tricky as I had never done it before and the first two attempts I had to make it work just resulted in a black screen and I could not work out what had went wrong (still haven't). But my third attempt using a online forum post I found started slightly similar, but I tweaked a couple of bits on it and got it to work ish. Knowing that this worked I just adapted the script a little and played around with it's settings still I had created 2 different versions, one a smaller screen shake and another a slightly bigger one.

So if you shoot a bomb whilst it is in the air you call the small screen shake script and if the bomb hits the ground you call the larger. The idea behind this is that if the bomb hits the ground there would be more of an impact and perhaps a shock-wave where as if its blown up in the sky it would have less shock-wave and as such have less of an impact on the player on the ground.

This actually works quite well and looks good, even if it meant I had to rework some of the layout so when the screen shook you didn't get too much black screen bits. I also tried to implement that the bomb itself woudl flash white before exploding, but alas I was unable to get this working from the examples I had found as it is a mixture of using materials and filers and such, basically things I have no knowledge of and have never used. I still plan to do this of perhaps something similar that I saw in a youtube video although it did not explain how to do it. So that is also on the list to do.

Next week I want to re-work the player bullet and also get a visual representation of how many bullets the player has and when they need to reload. This will need a fair bit of animation work and a few other bits and bobs. I also have come up with a few other ideas of things I want to add in, all little visual things that will help the game to look better and a bit more polished when it is done. But the things is I need to work out how to do these and then implement them, which also takes up more time. But the way I see it is that if I spend the time now learning to do these things then I will know for future projects how to do them. I am also on call next week with work, which means a weekend at home in the house, which also means cooking cleaning and tidying but also affords me some time to do work on WRA. So we will see what I can get added to the game this week, I also really want to get the player sprites done as well as the shooting animation if i get time and implemented as currently the sprite for the player is over sized and looks so out of place, which really doesn't help with the over all look/feel of the game.