I’ve just completed and published the Laser Defender project covered by the most recent unit in my Udemy course. As mentioned earlier, it’s sort of a Space Invaders/Galaga hybrid that while functional, isn’t particularly engaging. Point chasers were great in the 80’s but I’ve moved on since then 🙂
I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not really doing much more than what’s laid out in the coursework, but it’s largely because I’m racing through these projects in order to consume as much as possible in as short a time frame as I can. While there’s definitely something to be said for putting in the extra effort, anything I’ve come across that I didn’t fully understand I’ve talked about here as a way of clarifying the new knowledge in my own head.
After completing the Block Breaker game I discussed a few of the new concepts I learned as well as any stumbling blocks and I’m going to do that again here. I’m also going to include a bit of a “wish list” of things I would do to improve this game and fix any bugs I noticed if I ever decide to come back and finish it (spoiler: I probably won’t).
We touched on quite a few new concepts in this project including keyboard input controls, the collision layer matrix, sprite layers, animation, the particle system and passing values between scenes. In particular, the animations and particles were the most interesting and I can see where in future projects we’ll be spending much more time in those areas as this first exposure was definitely just that. There’s a lot more to these tools and I’m looking forward to figuring them out!
As for what I would do if this was a game I was serious about producing, here’s a shallow list of things that should be implemented.
- Indication that ship has been hit and of how many more hits our ship can take
- Explosion/particle effect when ships are hit/destroyed
- Lives
- Power ups
- Changing enemy ship types and formations after certain point totals have been achieved
- Reduce our rate of fire
- Reduce the size of the enemy container as ships are destroyed so a single ship can span the full width of the screen.
And here’s a few bugs that would need fixing as well.
- Re-spawn keeps filling in empty slots after you kill them instead of spawning a fixed number of enemies.
- The animation that moves the ships into position after they’ve been destroyed was lost when converting from Unity 4 to 5.
- Enemies can fire after they’ve been destroyed. I suspect this is a side effect of spawning the laser sprite underneath the enemy ship and we’re just destroying the enemy right after it’s fired. It does look wonky though, so I think offsetting the laser a bit so it’s immediately visible when fired would “fix” this.
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