Game
Hensen Hopper
1 month ago

So I've spent an hour and a half accomplishing ultimately nothing today so far. I love programming, it's a life-long special interest of mine, but I also HATE it SO MUCH sometimes! (warning: this is a rant)


Since both the beetle's sheild and the beetle-shell equipped sprite over the player both dynamically update according to the value of an integer (the beetle's health and the damageAbsorption count on the Player respectively), I am TRYING to create a script that would read an arbitrary integer field's value and set the sprite of a sprite renderer component on the same game object to a sprite mapped to that integer value in a list of pre-defined pairings that I can modify from the inspector (basically a dictionary except as an array of structs with an integer and Sprite field because C# dictionaries, I discovered, cannot be seen from the inspector window, just the cherry on top of the mountain of things about this endeavor that are royally pissing me off)

Sounds fairly simple, right?

WRONG!

It turns out, this is, to an asinine, absurd, downright hilarious degree, WAY more convoluted to do this conceptually simple action than any reasonable human being would ever idly think about even fever-dreaming to be the case! The obstacle I'm running into is getting the "arbitrary integer field" part of this to actually work. YES, you CAN use system.reflection BUT then performance may take a hit because I need to regularly check the value in order to do this and I won't allow THAT to happen because of course I'm too damn stubborn for my own good and need my game to run well in order to be satisfied with my work as the developer. Stupid fricking...

Game Dev
Shooter games
2


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Okay so fast forward ~2 and a half hours of work and I've gotten an effect to play when the shield breaks! There is a sound effect too but for some reason it sometimes doesn't play... Need to figure THAT out now... v0.2.1 is on the way today!

FIRST ACTUAL EDIT USING DAVINCI RESOLVE!!! Also, FINALLY, here's that clip of the beetle's idle animation I promised a while ago.

I've more or less finished off the beetle enemy's animations now. Here's a short video showing the defeat animation as well as how it currently looks in-game. I still need to work on an effect for when the shield breaks, though.

I DID end up making the body and elytra both 1 cycle/s and the wings 6 cycles/s. I'm working on a video of the animation itself playing in the Unity editor so you guys can see it properly. I think it turned out well!

Okay, so I've gotten the functionality for the beetle shell render over the player working! (using the first 3 frames from the beetle shell collect animation as placeholder sprites, these ARE NOT the final sprites)

The beetle shell is now fully VISUALLY implemented! Next thing on my list is a unique sound for Hensen equipping it.

I've been working on some proper visual art for the beetle shell when it's equipped! I've also gone ahead and drawn a break animation for it. All I need to do now is actually set all of this up in Unity which I'll probably do on Tuesday.

I've been working on the sprite for the beetle shell power-up drop! I'm thinking when you collect this one, it will kind of poof away similarly to the enemies when they're defeated and play an "equip" sound.

I added the leaf shield to the beetle since the last time I posted to Game Jolt! I've also added a detail where it deteriorates over time as you strike it with bullets which I think is a nice touch! Yes, it's a separate sprite from the beetle himself lol.

Here's a short demonstration of the beetle shell power-up in-action! It's not very obvious what it does at the moment because I still need to work on a lot of the effects for it, but the functionality is there if you pay attention to the health bar!