Second Post: Mist and UI
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I want to do some things that I do not feel I did properly last time. First, I wish to introduce myself, my team, and the project we are working on in more detail. My name is Adam Olsson, I study game design and programming at Uppsala university campus Gotland. I am currently, together with my team called team Zombie, in the middle of an assignment to make a simple shoot’em up based on a concept document that was written by other students last year. The concept document describes a game called Umibōzu where the player is tasked with navigating a ship through thick fog while encountering a number of weird creatures. The mist is an important part of our game. It primarily hides enemies and objects which the player can illuminate by using their searchlight (or whatever you would call a light on a ship). When I first started working on the light I was trying to make it an actual light source in unity. I quite quickly abandoned this in favor of a sprite mask instead. To me, the sprite mask was a much easier way of shining through the mist than using actual light, it also allowed the two artists on our team to have the light fit the aesthetics of the game better. A problem with the sprite mask is that it causes very sharp edges with the mist. I have not figured out exactly how to solve it, or if it should be prioritised before other problems. Right now we have different mist under the mist that gets removed by the sprite mask which makes the edges less jarring. Something else that I have worked with during the week is the basic UI. In short I have made a health bar and an icon that shows how much battery you have left for your light. The way I did the health bar was fairly simple. I have five sprites of hearts in an array and whenever the player loses or gains health the script loops through the array decides which of the sprites to render. For the battery I received help writing a function that based on the player’s amount of battery rendered a different sprite in the same location.
Anyways, that was it for this time. Thanks for reading!  |
Picture of the game. The light cuts through the mist and it looks a little bit weird. Health and battery can be seen in the top left.