Enemy Turrets

We all love a bit of combat. I don’t know if you read one of my first blogs about this project but I mentioned about having a number of things to shoot at, well I have been working on something to shoot at. Yep that’s right a turret. And what comes with a turret, something to shoot back at you right? I have designed a simply turret with a few nice textures and have given it a big gun to help immobilize you the player, at of course a time penalty. This though has lead me on to power-ups like a shield etc. that could protect you from being shot. But I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. For now here it the mean red bad boy!

I have attached a nice little script to the turret so that It tracks the player movement when the player enters the radius of the turret. It works by using a big sphere collider as the radius, then turret will engage the player by rotating the body to face the player on the Z axis and the turret guns with move to shot the player on the Y axis only. This is in aid to simulate a robot style drone feel, locking the movements to given pivot. The turret shares the same firing mechanism as the space ship, except with a different bullet and damage properties.

Locked Checkpoints

Following on from the previous post, I have now made the checkpoints that will be locked until activation. It wasn’t difficult to make the object however the script was a real pain. I’ve spent hours testing it. Basically what happens is both beams will move apart to their respective destinations and the portal beam will scale to its target size. Now all this happens over time, and I managed to get all of this to work however, it is very ‘dodgy’ you won’t notice in game, but from the scene view when the checkpoint is activated the beams move faster than the portal can scale. As a result it almost looks like the portal is trying to catch up with the pillars.

There is a few other things that occur when activating the checkpoint, the orb its self will turn green as a visual indication that the checkpoint has opened and then it will deactivate so it can no longer be triggered again.

You can see from the image, the locked checkpoint and the unlocked or final result on the left.

Energy Orbs!

Time for the shootable objects. I had a really cool thought not long ago about having locked checkpoints. Basically the same as you may have seen before in older posts, but have the 2 pillars next to each other stopping the player from being able to fit in the gap. This could then be unlocked by shooting and hitting the energy orb and activating the pillar. Cool right? Yeah! Well I have designed the energy orb with a number of cool features, that really make it stand out. Basically its a sphere with a halo glow like so:

This looks cool as it is but I wanted to adding something that would draw the players attention to it, so I added smaller orbs that would rotate around the main ball above. However not just move around it but orbit at a quick speed. This was tricky and took a lot of fiddling to get right. The code was actually really simple in the end. The new orbitable orb looked like this:

Finally one more thing to get this to look cool is I wrote a small script that would apply a vertical force for several seconds and then would do the reverse, effectively bobbing up and down. I liked this so much I added this to the checkpoints as well.

Custom Skybox

I have bored of flying around a grey sky when testing my level, so I have implemented a skybox that I feel will match the games setting very nicely. I had design this skybox before, which has been used in a previous game, created by my self and a fellow student. So I have just taken it from my old Unity project and pieced if together in this new Game.

As you can see it has a really nice feel, and it definitely suit this level really well. Its a simple effect but added in now really brings the empty world to life.

Checkpoint Triggering

I didn’t take me to long to get a working script, I am using a trigger to detect when the player (or ship) passes through it. I have attached this script to the portal looking beam as apposed to the whole checkpoint game object. When the trigger is activated the checkpoints Lights turn green, to signify the checkpoint has been triggered. The next checkpoints lights are set to yellow. The next checkpoint is manually specified in the inspector as a game object. The checkpoint sound is played once and the checkpoint counter is incremented. The trigger code looks like this:

You may notice the first condition is if the boolean isActive is true, this is what I use to check if a specific trigger is active. I am using this because I want to make sure that I can the checkpoints so that the players have to go through them in a specific order. The boolean variable is set to true on the checkpoint only if the lights on that specific checkpoints are yellow. Which as I mentioned before can only occur if the previous checkpoint has been triggered setting the next checkpoint to yellow.

Leap Guns

The ambition with this development is to have a really fun and interactive game, and everyone loves a shooter (well not everyone) so what better way to have a space ship that can fire. Well I have been able to get the flying part working today, I have also just managed to get the shooting to work also. Its actually really simple. I use Leaps built in Finger count method to check for how many fingers it can detect. If this value is equal to 1 then fire. I have also specified for this to only occur on the right hand of the player.  This means that the player can close there right hand and keep their thumb out to effectively fire.

Initially I had some real issues that I managed to sort, what happened is that I had to use a position that I specified as a transform to use a point to spawn a bullet that would appear to propel its self from the gun. I had 2 guns, so I needed to empty positions just in front of the guns. I would use those objects to specify the location and rotation for a bullet to be instantiated. Then I simply instantiate a bullet and the given position. I finally use a timer that works to calculate a wait period before the player can fire again. It is very small about 2/10 of a second. At first when I tested this I left the collider on the offset transform point, which meant every shot I fired would spawn in the position of that game object and collide with the collider and trigger a recoil on the plane and really mess with the handling. However this was fixed with the disabling of the collider.

Flying Leap Controller

After some real trial and error and reading some of the documentation for how the leap motion manipulates data, I have been able to read and use several Unity functions to calculate a smooth rotation based on the distance between hands and the height/depth.

I retrieve the hands individually, and store them per frame like so:

During the FixedUpdate I then begin to calculate the positioning of the palm or the angle, then I calculate the distance between the hands, and finally use the previous to calculate the rotation to allow for a banking feel when you want to turn left and right, up and down. I then take the speed and apply a velocity to the rigidbody of the space ship. The working code so far looks like this:

After some testing on the space ship I like the results. I will be using this from now on, I don’t doubt I will be having to add more code to in the future but for now it works. 🙂