Juiced up space invaders

Motivation

For my specialization I decided to take a retro game and juice it up. In the previous projects I've partaken in I've mostly been working on backend systems and never really got the opportunity to get a feel for what it takes to make a game feel good and fun to play. I'm comfortable with my role as a backend developer and the purpose of this specialization is not necessarily to get a foot into gameplay but rather to get a better understanding of what kind of workflow a well developed engine allows for. It has been a fun experience though and I am looking forward to taking on smaller projects such as this one in the future to help me become a better developer!

I initially intended to make this in TGAs 2D engine to further develop and expand on the systems I have previously made to enable me to get to the kind of polished result I was looking for. In the end i decided to use an industry engine such as Unity to be able to focus more on the game itself instead of engine development.

Camera shake

Thanks to Unity I had a working prototype after 2 days of development and it was time to start adding some effects. I do enjoy a good camera shake, so that's where I started.

I set up a couple of requirements for the system before I started:

  • Shakes can be shared between objects. The data had to be separated from the functionality.

  • Additive effects, i.e. several different shakes could affect the camera simultaneously.

  • Easy to call, preferably one line of code.

Using animation curves and random number ranges I got a data structure that gave me a lot of customizability. I migrated the struct to a ScriptableObject, which meant each variation I created existed as it's own object and could be referenced by other scripts.

The actual shaking is applied through a component attached to the camera. The additive effect is achieved by using coroutines to accumulate an offset which is then applied on the fixed update.

Calling the shake: myHitCameraShake.ShakeCamera();

This system was later expanded to allow any object to be shook. This expansion also introduced scale. This effect was applied to the enemies as well as the score counter: myHitShake.Shake(gameObject);

Conclusion

Going back to Unity after a year of using our own engines was a pleasant experience. I haven't really been looking up other solutions when I build my own systems and I realize now how important that is, especially when I'm not the the sole user.

I have been working a fair bit with the shaderpipeline in the engine my group created at TGA and I wished I had done some more research before I got started with that. If you're interested in how it works you can read more here. Shaders being attached to materials makes so much sense and sounds like a lot of fun to implement.

Unfortunately, there's not much cool tech to show off since it's all mostly simple systems combined with a couple of shaders but I'd still say I achieved what I set out to do. I got to experience Unity from the viewpoint of a backend developer, learned a couple of lessons on researching and got a end result that I think is pretty fun to play.

The end result