Day 19: Throwing Stars
It’s about 10 days before the projected end of my internship at GameDevHQ! This upcoming week is stacked with work. In addition to working on my space shooter full time, I have one more module, quiz, and final project for the IT Fundamentals course I am taking with Kapiolani Community College. I’m hoping to have the 2D course completed before Christmas, so the pressure is on!
As for today’s work, I began by making some adjustments to Enemy2 and its weapon. I placed a Shuriken particle effect on the plasma bomb that ripples outward, growing in size before detonating. The bomb has a two second delay before it explodes, then damages and applies force to all objects nearby. It was my first time working with physics in a weapon script, and I got a kick out of watching the asteroid and player fly around the scene from the force of the plasma bomb. I’ll be sure to record a demo of this tomorrow, but for now here’s a preview:
During our Team A afternoon check in, I mentioned that I was stuck on writing a successful script for the spawning systems and received some great input from my team mates. Instead of having a wave spawner script separate from the main spawn manager script, it seems that integrating the two and spawning the enemies from a list is most effective. This is a process I learned earlier on in the 2D course and implemented to spawn the powerups. The difference here is that the powerups spawn randomly, while the enemies spawn in sequences, or waves — with each wave more difficult to defeat than the last.
This week has been my most challenging yet, and I’m hoping to make more progress tomorrow to finish it off strong.
