Continuing from the last post, I’ll still talk about developing our game idea for the GameOff2020 Game jam.
So it’s time to give the project a boost in how it will look like. I definitely knew that we’d need one/more good background for the game, so I started at this point: let’s experiment with a random pixel art background and see how it looks. Also, I started to work on the HUD and adding some post-process effects, and the first result was… not really good enough for me.
It’s definitely clear that I’m not a graphic artist indeed, and those placeholder platforms don’t create a good mood either. I turned my face towards the Unity Asset Store and Google. After a half an hour search, I had a tilemap on my hands and many questions; the main was: how can I use tilemaps in Unity? So I started to dig in in the usual way: documentation, blog posts, videos. I chose a small but good looking tilemap package from the asset store: 2D Dungeon Pixel Art Tileset (Thanks Zhivko Minchev for sharing it free)
This result (I admit it’s weird at points) was satisfying my needs. This way, I was able to think more with 2D Lighting, and the tools are starting to get in my head, which is an excellent thing. One of my goals is to learn new things; I think I’m on the right path to achieve this goal.
With tilemaps, you have as many layers as you like, and you can paint them using the created tiles. One of the biggest question for me was how the player will interact with the tiles, turned out my original idea to create invisible blocks was somewhat funny and totally wrong. Unity has a component that can be added to one/more layers: Tilemap Collider 2D. It’s creating the necessary colliders per tile and handles everything you need as a start.
Now that looks are somewhat enjoyable, it’s time to turn our head towards more game mechanics:
- weapon fire
- healing
- reverse/normal controls
Weapon fire
Let’s think about a weapon, and it’s usage. The character holds it in her hand, aim and pull the trigger. What happens is up to the game itself: it can show the bullets or use a ray cast to find if the gun was pointed at an enemy and apply the damage.
In our case, I wanted to show the bullets and actually have the bullet deal with the “damage.” The reason is that in our idea, a bullet can cause damage but can also heal (depending on which way the player is going in time). As a bullet is speedy, I also had my requirement to show the bullet’s path. The decision is easy: I need a trail renderer on the bullet. Also, a bullet looks great if it’s creating some shading along its way, so I’ve added a little 2D point light to it.
Now with this done, it’s time to heal. In the game some things will weird intentionally, but healing is a common topic for every game where you have an amount of hitpoints. We’ll have many things in the game which will change the players health so in detail we’ll show these later.
The one which I want to show right now it’s pretty ordinary: you have a health-station (I call it Health Bar) which on interaction will heal some amount of your life.
Now to the reverse. What do we need to reverse? The player needs to move backward with reversed controls (press left and you’ll go right); bullets are coming back towards the weapon instead of going away from it. Let’s check it out as the last step for this week:
