Update: Quicker update this week. I focused on the city destruction animation and the hostile weapon spawn point and associated timer.
First, the animation. I expanded on a few ideas in a first draft silhouette. After referencing a YouTube, which provided some governmental footage of nuclear testing in the Pacific (link), I realized that I was animating two separate processes: the explosive flash and the “signature,” “mushroom,” cloud. So, I re-silhouetted the animation to start with the explosive flash, roughly doubling in sizes for the first frames and then transitioning into the clouds. I also made use of the selection and mirror tools (in GIMP) to shorten the workflow a bit. Still a silhouette, I’ll want to color it before throwing it into Godot.
Second, the spawn point and timer. This was fairly straight forward and, best of all, it will save me some work in the future. At the moment it is a bit barebones, three gravity bombs (essentially) are dropped off the top of the screen onto the left-most city. With the x-position of the bomb being hard-coded. The timer is a one-shot 1 or 2 second timer at the beginning (so that I can get to the mouse and get ready) and then a 20 millisecond timer between the bombs themselves. The next step here, of course, will be a randomization of what cities are targeted by the gravity bombs – easy.
I also had a good think this week about the GUI specifically the score and some of the flippant remarks that I made in the last post. The score will end up being the in-game “resource” that the player has to manage, the currency, in other words.
Next Steps:
- Hostile weapon spawn point
Timer
- Randomizations of numbers and locations
- GUI
- score
- enemy weapons left (maybe),
- available player reloads
- Player missile explosion
- City destruction animation
Second draft silhouette- Draft in color and in Godot
Objective: First the next couple of weeks (most likely) my focus will be on completing the asset for the city explosion animation and wiring that in Godot. Perhaps more important, though, would be the mechanic for player missile explosions. As the game stands, it is fairly difficult for me to hit the enemy warheads on their way down – which, again, is part of the point. I could also quicken the process and just use the first frames from the city explosion animation, its just a fireball after all. Once these two things are drafted and in, I’ll move on to the score.
Tired Fox Projects 