Game Dev in Progress… Day 9
Hello and happy Monday! Today I started on doing the final two sections of the GameDevHQ 2D Course. I managed to get through 75% of the first section. The last two sections are challenges that test all the things that have learned so far in the course. The first four challenges were around medium in difficulty range. The last three from what I’ve seen are pretty difficult. I’ve also looked at the last section and they also seem difficult but doable.
Overall, today was a pretty chill day. Most of the challenges were easy-medium and the only part that I was stumped on was how to implement the multi-directional laser shot functionality. The challenge required me to implement a new powerup that changes the way the spaceship lasers behave. An example would be like a heat seeking laser or multi-directional lasers. I picked to implement the latter as I found it to be easier then the heat seeking one.
When I looked at this challenge, the first thing I did was visualize what would happen. The way I would see a multi-directional lasers is just a bunch of lasers surrounding the spaceship and then they would move at a direction away from the player. So in my mind, I would need some way to move the laser and also position them to surround the player. And then I just googled it in order to get some understanding on how I should start. However only one of the Google results actually helped.
This one result helped me understand how rotations in Unity works. The example that they gave me used a bit of trigonometry in order the calculate the angle of the direction of the lasers. However, I used a different approach. Instead of doing trigonometry, I manually input the angle since I only wanted a very specific amount of lasers to appear. So with that I was able to position and as well as move the lasers to where I wanted it to go. Thank you google!
This is a good example of how you can research and use google to your advantage. Even though it might not be the exact answer that you are looking far but it can help formulate a solution for your problem. Anyway that is it for me. Thank you for reading!!!
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Cristian Aspacio
