I recently had a nice, month long holiday in South Africa. Apart from affording me some well deserved downtime and a “castaway-like” beard, this meant I was also able to get quite a lot done on my re-working of “Cosmosis” (my original iPhone/iOS app) using the Unity engine. This time the game will be developed for just about every platform out there – one of the best features of the Unity engine! Being a re-write from the ground up, this has meant I have also been adding a lot of new features and new systems to my Unity 2D space shooter (shmup) project.

• Global Game Jam 2014
• Ludum Dare
• Capture The Car: Global Game Jam 2016 Version Mac Os X

This post covers the work I did on a new weapon – the “arc laser”. Here is a quick demo of a short burst fire on the laser:

Bonus 0h Game Jam. Also happening this week was 0h Game Jam! Just in case you don’t know what 0hr Game Jam is, it’s a game jam that happens right as daylight savings time ends. You have one hour to make a game the hour before the clocks reset an hour. This means that from 2am until 2am, you have 1 hour to make a game (in 0 hours). Watch free NBA video highlights, news, and analysis. Also, explore NBA TV & League Pass subscriptions to watch live games on your favorite devices.

Currently, once the laser is picked up, you get around 10 seconds worth of firing out of it. After this it runs out and you switch back to your primary cannon fire (or your primary cannon fire plus rockets if you had previously collected that weapon). The laser also features a small animation on the player’s ship, which is the laser arc cannon mount point, which pops out as you start firing. This needs a little bit of tweaking as the position is slightly out at the moment.

• A game jam is a period of crunch time, i.e., the context requires the participants to focus the available time on a ctivities that directly provide value for the final game and skip everything.
• Enrollment: Limited. The Global Game Jam (GGJ) is the world's largest game jam event taking place around the world at physical locations. Think of it as a hackathon focused on game development. Participants will work in teams of 4-5 to develop dynamic autonomy software to race a converted RC car equipped with LIDAR, a.
• Screencheat is a ridiculous competitive split-screen first-person shooter where everyone is invisible, so players are forced to look at each other’s screens in order to win. Supporting both local and online multiplayer, combat in Screencheat is fast and furious with a wide variety of one-hit kill weapons.

Here is how I achieved the laser effect for anyone interested:

• Two line renderers, one with a small transparent PNG texture with a gradient going from light to darker blue. Each line renderer is attached to a gameobject on the player’s ship
• The primary beam line renderer has two points, and a 2D collider. When the beam fires, in code I set each point of the line renderer according to the player’s position, and a point off screen. I also activate the collider which is disabled by default.
• The secondary line renderer is what I use to achieve the arcing effect. This has around 20 points, which I manipulate using the Mathf.Sin function. (See further below).
• When firing, a float value is tracked, and the deltatime from the game’s update loop is subtracted from this to determine how much more “ammo” your laser has. Once it runs out, the line renderers are disabled and the weapon removed.
• Taking your finger off the trigger so to speak also results in the line renderers and the collider being disabled (along with the sound effect for the laser).
• Damage is applied to enemies when the laser’s collider hits them. Of course, damage needs to be incremental, rather than once off like other projectile weapons are, so a timer is used to damage enemies based on how much time they spend colliding with the laser beam.

Here is the basic code I use to manipulate the points on the arcing laser beam, giving them the animated effect you see above:

Well, that covers the laser weapon update. There are plenty more changes that have been made recently, so I’ll have to cover those off in another post!

Global Game Jam 2014

Ludum Dare

Capture The Car: Global Game Jam 2016 Version Mac Os X