From Photographer to Video Game Creator — Day 17

Spent most of today on a plane traveling from Hawaii to North Carolina, but lucky for me I had plenty of coding to do!

I started another weapon powerup for my Player today. I was pretty excited for this since it was really the first objective that was totally up to us. I decided to add a weapon that would act as a reflector for Enemies and Enemy lasers. The idea is to have the Player launch out a capsule that will fly upwards and spawn a barrier from its location of destruction. This barrier will then hover back and forth on the screen for a set amount of time while deflecting Enemy lasers and destroying Enemies that come in contact with it.

First up was to create a new object with a new script. This script will be for defining the capsule that will be launched from the Player object. This capsule is set to a slower speed and coded to destroy after 1.5 seconds. Here is a look at the beginning stages of the script:

I also made sure that the barrier powerup was able to be collected by the Player. This sets “_canBarrierFire” to true which allows the Player to fire the barrier. I included a quick debug to double check that the scripts were communicating correctly.

At this point I made a simple object image for my barrier just so I could visualize the Player instantiating something other than the laser. It works!

Now it’s time to make it look cool. Using Procreate, I drew up a barrier that would take the place of the previous image. This barrier has some lights and bright bars, and it will also have a thruster animation playing underneath it!

The final task for the day was to create the capsule that would be carrying up the barrier from the Player. I haven’t finished the textures on this object yet, but I’ve got the outline and lights added.

I’m really enjoying creating and adding my own images into Unity. It really opens up the possibilities of what I can create!

Tomorrow is Christmas Eve so I may be MIA for the next couple of days, but I’ll be sure give some updates this weekend!

Cheers!

Myles M.