It’s Not the Girl Scouts!
If you’d like to skip to this week’s video, you can find that HERE. You can also find all of the previous videos in the videos section.
This week turned out to be far more productive than I had hoped, although that means that I’m only now posting the video and blog. Everything was coming together so well, it was really hard to make myself stop. I’m incredibly lucky that I’ve been able to work on this, and even luckier that people are interested enough to follow along.
Fire-works instead of Fire-sorta’s
I was finally able to get the trails on the firework explosions to work the way they should. All this time it was apparently a shader issue! Shaders, simply put, are scripts that handle the colors of your objects. There are a few different colors for the moment while I play around with the different gradients. I originally had little skulls raining down instead of sparkles, but then remembered this is a video game and not a Hot Topic store.
The particle effects I used to create the fireworks are ridiculously fun! I’m new at this, however, so it’s best to have a reliable way to tell how many frames-per-second are being rendered when I use them.
Talk about a great segue!
Carl’s Cell Phone
Okay, it’s certainly not the latest iPhone or Android, but it is a working prototype! I really wanted a cool way to display the score, and also a place to keep the menu button. While a cell phone seemed like a great idea, I didn’t want another item you needed to keep track of in the game. This is where I came across Skid Vis and his Sharkjets YouTube channel. Coincidentally enough, it turns out he had an 11-minute video covering exactly what I needed!
I would highly recommend checking out his videos if you use Unity and the VR Interface Framework like I do. If Couch Invaders is finished in under a year, it will be because of two reasons: the amazing work BNG did in creating the VR Interface Framework, and the tutorials made by Skid Vis.
New Zombie
Finally, the “I’m calling about your extended warranty” zombie makes his return! As part of bringing him back, I also changed the way that the zombies groan. With so many zombies on the screen, it can get pretty chatty. I’ll be adding a “chattiness” value to each zombie to help determine how often they’ll groan or talk.
This brings the total to 3 zombies, so I added some extra spawn points in the yard where they can generate. With 13 zombies and only 8 spots, they would end up on each others heads if I didn’t space out the timing a bit.
Like the first time I tried it…
This was great, although having the zombies airborne wasn’t actually the plan. I liked the 3-zombie tall piggyback rides, though. Having this many zombies on-screen at the same time is a little loud, so I tweaked the code behind the zombie groans. Instead of just going with a timer plus random offset, I take a “chattiness” probability of about 15 percent. I’m adding this to the remaining zombies so that there can be a few talkative ones, but mostly not.
I can’t imagine anyone would want to be in a backyard with a bunch of undead Chatty Kathy’s.
That’s all for this week, guys! The Game Developer Conference starts tomorrow morning, and I actually get to attend! It’s a week-long event, so I may not have much progress to show next week. I’m still excited though, in that “oh man I should have been in bed already” sort of way.
Thank you guys for checking in!