Video Devlogs?
From now onwards I've decided to stop the video devlogs, mostly due to the time it takes to make them over a text based log. I've also re-vamped the Carter Games website posts section to now host these posts amoung annoucements & longer posts I can't make on socials. Below is a CC of the latest devlog that came out Monday. You can see the posts page here if you are instested, it also includes all the devlog of a project I started at the start of the year that is currently on hold.
What’s new!
Water shader
By far one of the worst bits of the last few months has been choosing a good water shader. Now I’m no artist so I couldn’t make my own & I have 0 budget so I couldn’t just buy one. So I had to go off the free options on the asset store & GitHub to find something to use for this project. While a lot of the shaders would be great of other games where the player is at the level or more or less the level of the water. However in a top-down view there is the common problem with the tiling texture or effects with the shaders that the user can easily notice.
After trying upwards of 50 shaders and/or effects I finally decided to stick with one of the more customisable, that being the stylized water for URP:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/vfx/shaders/stylized-water-for-urp-162025
A screenshot of the arcade scene in C.W.I.S with the new water shader
The shader still isn’t perfect and I would certainly prefer a more random tiling one, but it is better than the old shader I used in the jam version of the game which was much worse than this option in my opinion.
Missile Launchers
I’ve spent a fair bit of time on these launchers and still have more time to spend on them before they are completely working as intended. I did however spend a fair bit of time getting them up to scratch with fixed to the actual prefabs so they can be correctly reset when reaching their target.
Previously the missiles would throw an error on their reset due to a coroutine still running on them when the object is disabled. The routine was the one that managed the missiles pathing lifetime and would not quite reach the end due to the physics collision detecting the hit between both the player missile & the incoming missile.
On top of this I’ve added the actual launch sequence of the missile so when you fire a missile it takes a little longer to get into the air. This is done by having the hatch of the missile tube actually open before the missile fires. Once it has opened an event fires that tells the missile to spawn as it did beforehand so the rest is just as it was before. Though I did fix an issue where only 3-4 tubes were been used to launch missiles due to a little mistake on my part with a boolean value not updating correctly.
Below is a little video of the new launcher in action:
No more five-inch gun?
For the purposes of the arcade build I’ve decided to turn off the five-inch gun as its usage is not needed in the basic missile defence scenario. All the code is still there and all, its just had its script disabled in the scene so the player can’t select it when playing. Instead the player start on the forward C.I.W.S instead which is more practical. Down the line the five inch or the main gun would be used to target surface target at a defined range which will have more use in the campaign, missions or PVP/PVE combat.
Supply Drops
In the arcade build supply drops where just crates that came by every now and then, when they hit the mid point of the ship you would get some ammo and a chance to get some health back. I do plan to add a ship health regen setup to the game, but it won’t be through supply crates. Its more likely the ship will heal over time if its not been hit for x amount of seconds with some UI to help indicate the change of state. The new setup has you calling in a supply drop via the communications array which starts a timer in the top left. When that timer completes a supply drop drops down onto the heli-pad section of the ship and when it reaches the ship the user gets ammo for their weapons systems at random amounts.
The visuals for this still needs a little work as they are currently just primitives and it shows. So more on that soon. I’m also considering possibly adding a few upgrades to the communications array to speed up the time it takes for a drop to arrive & the quantity of the ammo provided. But these are yet to be implemented.
Controls Menu
Another minor change since the last update is a new panel & button in the game menu showing the controls for the game. There is controller support planned as its super easy to add that in the future, but that’ll be after the arcade build. These controls are also shown on the pause menu of the game for convivence.
Closing notes
That wraps up this devlog/update, these written logs will be the main form of updates from here on out instead of videos. Its a lot quicker for me to type stuff out as the videos took almost a day and a half to make so its a much better use of my time. The next written log will be around a month from now or sooner if there is a lot to show off. Feel free to comment below this post if you have an questions or feedback to give and I’ll speak to y’all again soon!
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