Power-up(s)

I mentioned in my last post about the possibility of a range of power-ups to help against enemy fire etc. Well I have created a shield power-up that can protect the player from enemy fire. It works well, I have spent a great deal of time on the shield itself. I managed to create in Photoshop a simple force field looking texture, which I attached to the shield and simply made it transparent. This looked ok’ish but it didn’t give much of a feeling like a shield would. So a simply fix of a texture rotation script fixed this for me. I basically rotated the texture on 2 axis a small amount of time, giving it the appearance of it moving kind of like a force field would.

The power-up icon its self is a cube that has an alpha texture on it in the shape of a shield to give a clear indicator of what it is. This can either be shot or collided with directly with the player to be activated. Once activated the power-up object will fade out, using an alpha colouring blend, and the shield surrounds the player for 10 seconds before deactivating.

The Shield when activated looks like this: