12 NOV 2022:
- All 4 Battleships are DONE! -- Minus some very minor adjustments.
- I also added a subtle flickering effect to the below-deck fires on the Battleships. I'm a strong believer that small attentions to detail can go a long way.
- With all that done, I started on the first of the four Carriers. The "Left Carrier" spawn point is set and can move across the screen. Animating these larger enemies can be a huge chore, so to minimize that -- and to prevent scope creep to some degree -- I've decided that the only target on the Carrier will be the hangar bay as shown above. To make it more interesting and appear as if your bullets are actually detonating inside the Carrier, I used point lights in Blender to give a nice internal explosion effect. It actually turned out much better than I planned!
- The Carrier Fighters can use some work -- they don't follow the player as well as I would like them to. If the player is too far away they're not even a threat.
- Unlike the Battleships, the Carriers will be a little more unique, especially the ones that face DOWN or UP.
- A lot of the enemies in Scrapship have very complicated shapes. This makes collisions between enemies and the player very tricky. If the player collides with an enemy, it absolutely has to look like it did -- otherwise the player will cry foul and say that was a very cheap death (and I would agree). This got me to thinking about how other shmups handle collisions with enemies. At the moment I'm considering getting rid of collisions between the player ship and enemy ships entirely. For one, this simplifies things because the game is not having to process complicated hitbox coordinates. It also gives the player a little more freedom to fly around. Finally, this means that the only objects the player will have to be wary of are projectiles that are obviously projectiles that can hurt you. So if you hit a bomb or a laser, then you probably died fair and square.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"More is lost by indecision than by wrong decision." -- Cicero
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!