Again I apologize for the lack of updates, but university and work leave me little time to do anything else. And there are so many games to play. The completely non-existent motivation to create levels for Void() doesn’t help either. But since you are my only reader, there are not that many people upset.
Anyways, one course in university is about Unity and while most peers don’t have much experience with it, if any, I can do a little bit more than just follow the tutors’ examples. The first project is meant to be a space shooter, and since I had some spaceship models sitting on my HDD for quite some time which were once meant for such a game that sadly never came to fruition, I decided to revive them and create the game I wanted to then (albeit now on my own).
Currently I have all three player ships implemented, completely with all their weaponry (except the Smartbomb). The weapons are all upgradeable, but the system to do that is still in the planning stage. I have yet to decide if I want the player to be awarded money with which to buy upgrades between levels or to have some items flying around in the levels that upgrade the weapons when collected. The missiles track enemies, but not asteroids, the asteroids will break up into smaller pieces when destroyed, but only once. The smaller pieces will not break up again, they just disappear in a puff of smoke. The asteroids also collide with each other (without breaking up) and their respective mass is determined automatically by their local scale to make the collisions behave more correctly, although I don’t intend to make this a celestial body physics simulation, so the collisions are not nearly realistic. After all I have to override the z-component of the resulting movement-vector and set it to zero to keep the asteroids in the correct plane. They damage the player (and enemies) when they collide with him and the damage done is their current health, which is also determined by their scale (so a hit from a small piece is much less severe than one from a big one).
Initially I planned to build the game for Android, since I got my hands on a basic Android Unity license when they were free a couple of months ago and wanted to learn how to do touch controls, but for some reason my machine doesn’t want to. I installed the Android SDK, the JDK (32bit and 64bit), all Android APIs since 2.3.3, but when I want to build, Unity throws an error. I have found that I can successfully build a game for a couple of minutes after a fresh Unity install, but after a short amount of time (roughly 15 minutes, didn’t measure it) the error is back. The error is independent of the project I want to build, when it happens with one project, it happens with all others, even empty ones. It is simply no fun to have to re-install Unity every time I want to update the build, so I shelved the idea for now. On the bright side this allows me to go overboard with particle effects and stuff. The first version I managed to build for Android was quite choppy on my device already.
And now, after the wall of text, some screenshots.
I’m interested! sounds good 😉