The Path of the Game Dev — Day 16

Saving progress…

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Friday marks the start of the end with the big boy: the final boss of the 2D Space Shooter.

I’m using a sprite from the Asset store that I found earlier this week for the boss that spawns on the 10th wave of enemies. In accordance with the Phase 2 requirements, it moves down to the center of the screen and stops.

But today was more of a day of messing around with the sprites, starting to set up the UI for the boss’s health, and planning the attack patterns for the boss. This means messing with the colliders, adding rigidbodies, attaching scripts… Rinse and repeat for each new projectile type.

My ideas for the boss’ attacks include homing missiles which can be destroyed by the player’s lasers. To do this I took a similar approach to the Player’s homing laser script but edited it so that it would only track and damage the player. This script is attached to a pair of missiles that came with the other asset package. And I’ve had success with them homing in on the player and being destroyed by lasers!

Given that this is getting towards the end of the 2D game development course, I thought it would be a good time to share a bit of what I’ve thought about the past two weeks. It’s been a wild ride, with some days being full of progress and others being frustratingly slow. But all in all learning how to use Unity and to code in C# is something I’ve found to be a valuable tool to test yourself with. You can impart your own creativity into each step of the process, you can learn a million ways of doing one thing by researching and asking your peers. At the end of the day it’s your hard work.

Biggest takeaways from the day: You can do it! Tedious at times, yes, but worth it at the end of the day.

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Progress saved!