Protecting earth
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Hello readers. I am back from the dead with yet another exciting week of game development. This week I will talk about a rather big sprite I have been working on. This asset is one of four shields that surrounds the planet in our game. The humans gathered as much metal as they could spare to create this outer planetary defense.
It was easy to create. I used a circle shape in Photoshop to create a circle. Then I divided it with four. What I got was pretty much the image as seen above. I then used the rectangle tool to create the different metalpieces. Using the eraser I made the rectangles fit together neatly. Some black dots as bolts to add to the handmade feeling of the shield. The outer bolts has a gradient fill on them, to give the bolts a bit of diversity. At first they were all black which cluttered up the asset quite a bit. The shield was feeling a tiny bit flat at first. I solved this issue by changing the values of the color gray. Not only does it make for a more interesting asset, but it also creates a stronger DIY/hand made feeling I wanted it to have. And I know, it would never look this good if it was a DIY shield. But it needed to look like it was made by a civilisation which time era is set further into the future, but using old craftmanship methods. The shield also has an animation. It is not really finished but I wanted to show it!
The idea is that when the shield gets hit by alien ships again and again it overheats. The heat from inside makes the shield go into a standby mode, leaving the corresponding sector unattended. The animation still needs smoke to be added, as well as an animation that shows the shield being ”disassembled” to cool off. In our game, the shield never recovers. If we had more time to develop maybe we could add a system where the shields would reappear as they had cooled down. Could be cool but I will pitch the idea another time!
That is all from me. See you next week, the final week of our Planet Suburbia project! //Jonatan Ersarp  |
