The Path of the Game Dev — Day 12

Saving progress…

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A slow Monday, but we got through it nonetheless.

I started working on some new enemy types required for Phase 2. After these past two weeks of editing the powerups, I realized I wanted these new enemies to have unique silhouettes instead of the same sprite in different colors, making it easier for the player to visually identify and predict the enemies movements and attacks. Our team lead suggested we check out the Assets store as we all move through the big 2D projects. Taking her advice I went through and found some assets I liked.

That was the easy part.

Actually coding an enemy to have a laser beam or homing in on the player and ramming into them isn’t working out as well as I’d hoped. Currently I have it set up to have the two new enemies spawn appropriately, with the giant beam a child object of the beam enemy. But I’ve had a bit of trouble getting the interactions and animations to work. While the enemies aren’t running into each other and blowing up or shooting each other, there is still more work needed to get the explosion animation to work when the new enemies die.

Another small hiccup I ran into was the beam enemy spawning upside down! I scrambled to think of why this would be happening — was it something I overlooked in the Start method? The movement method?

Nope, I had just set the Z rotation to 180 on the sprite for some reason.

Biggest takeaways from the day: And I thought adding things to the player was hard? Ha!

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Progress saved!