I wanted to enter the game into Intel’s Game Demo contest. In may, I spent some time cleaning up the Sky Hawks project. This was a good exercise in creating something that was in a state that could ship. While this is in no means representative of final quality, I feel that the demo does a good job of illustrating the game play that I am going for.
New Features:
I got in a new Rocket weapon power up, added glow effects to the enemy and player bullets. I was also able to make the crab boss a multi-part enemy. I plan on extending it with a finite state machine. Right now, the boss is way too easy to kill. While the boss health bar is nice, its not synced up to the crab’s actual health variable. I plan to fix this by assigning other visual indicators. One idea that I have is to rig the boss, and play an animation when one of his parts is fully destroyed. I need to look up mesh swapping, or figure out some other way to show damage over time. I also plan to recreate the game’s UI. The briefing screen helps break up the two scenes, but I can put a stronger transition in between levels. Also I need to fix that damn background tile. There are of two ways to fix this. One way is to create a series of pieces, and string them together with tiling code that swaps them on the fly. The other way is to actually create the whole thing in Maya. I’m not sure which one I’ll try yet. I’m leaning more towards full level design in Maya. Laying out level tiles in Unity is a bit of a pain.
Marketing stuff:
More updates are coming. I re-did the Sky Hawks’ project page. I am also vowing to post more media to the Bonus Stage Facebook page. If you ‘like’ classic games with modern graphics and twists. Check us out on Facebook.I plan on expanding this build for Unity 3d’s competition. Every contest is practice in professional deadline management. Winning would be gravy. This summer will see heavier development on the game. I plan on producing a trailer soon. Stay tuned! Check out our Screen shots section for updated images.
