Blog Week 5: Power Shot
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Another week has flown past and it is now Thursday, that means a new blog post. The day of the final is closing in so fast! This week I have been working on the power shot arrow. The power shot arrow is the sprite that our regular arrow (see the ”blog week 3: The arrow for more information about it) changes into when you pick up the power up aptly named ”power shot”. What the power shot does is fairly simple, it’s a piercing arrow which pierces through multiple enemies in a line unlike the basic arrow which only hits one and then it disappears. Before this we didn’t have any visual effect to show when this power up is activated and how long the player can use it, making it really hard to notice when it was in use this is why the artifact is important for our game. Visually I wanted to keep the normal arrow as it was, just some extra effects. I also decided to follow the colour theme the power up icon had, I did this for obvious reasons I wanted the connection between the power up icon and its visual effect to be coherent. Doing this sprite was not particularity hard once I knew how to do it. I used the sprite sheet from the original arrow then I just changed the hue and saturation of the arrow to make it white and red (as opposed to the blue and white like the original). After that I added an “aura bubble” around the arrow which pulsates, the bubble is white with red edges, I did this because I wanted the power shot to have some sort of energy around it to truly show that this arrow is different from the usual one. I set the “bubble” to an opacity of 50 percent so that it would have some sort of translucency and to make sure that it wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb, I also decided to put the arrow on a separate layer above the bubble because otherwise the white colour of the bubble would wash out the arrow’s colour making it look dull. The lead programmer requested that I keep the sprite sheet for the power shot at the same size as the original arrow as it would make their lives easier. It was rough to keep it within the frames and I would’ve loved to have added a longer trail on the projectile to emphasize the piercing effect, but with the limitations I had to work with I can’t see how that would be possible without compromising the quality.  |
