Day 8: Set Phasers to DESTROY
I do love a good animated explosion, and luckily, the bulk of my day was spent learning in the section “Effects (VFX)”. Nearly a decade ago now, I once majored in graphic design. Although I didn’t complete my degree, I’ve always loved art — especially visual arts — and was extremely excited to get to this section of the course. I’m clearly quite the novice here when it comes to game animation, but just to be able to toggle the hue, saturation, and intensity of the Filebase sprites brought me back to my roots. I’d love to learn more about post-production editing in the future.
To start off the day, I finally got through fixing my score text to update each time the player destroys an enemy. Ultimately, I couldn’t find the issue and decided to go back and redo that section of “User Interface (UI)”, which ended up being far less difficult than trying to find one line of buggy code.
After getting back on track, I moved into the “Effects” section where I added animations for enemy explosions and coded the behavior for them. Another added feature, to start off the game, is an astroid upon which being destroyed triggers the enemies and powerups to begin spawning— referred to as a “spawn wave”. You also may note that it subtly rotates in place.
Lastly, to round off this section, a thruster animation was added to the tail of the player’s ship, as well as two engine failure animations, triggered by collisions with the enemy. After one hit, the left engine begins to smoke; a second, the right begins to smoke; and after a third, fin.
