This week I added breakable armour to the Boss target. It breaks after a number of hits, and has different hit placeholder vfx and sfx.
Away from the computer, I drew some concept art to represent the armour components, and had a think about how to implement the armour into the game. I decided, the boss armour was purely for adding aesthetics and gameplay fun for the player. The boss stage is governed by a timer, and the idea was to hit the boss as many times as possible, while accruing higher points at Level Complete. Greater points could be achieve, once the boss was unprotected.
Modelling simple armour components, I added these to the Boss prefab as 5 different game objects. Small changes were made to the placeholder boss target meshes, and I noted that some animation tweaks were necessary, so all targets were consistent, and animating as required. Mesh collisions were added so collision worked correctly from all angles of camera rotation. Then I decided to set aside the boss target because the gameplay was dependent one final target, the Lobber.
However, I still wanted to add target animation in the Main Menu. I chose to use a rotating main camera, and a 360 degree stage set populated with targets and ledges for different height.
Last week, I you may recall that I built a 3d mock-up of the stage, using target meshes to indicate proposed target positions. Using these objects as a guide, I placed target position ‘helpers’, game objects, around the stage set, and reexported my set mesh, sans the red target meshes. For performance, I grouped the helpers in a single variable datatype, so I could skim through a small cohort of positions, quickly, and wrote some code that created a shortlist of helpers, currently visible within the camera frustum. From here I could easily chose a random position to instantiate a target to.
I also built a prototype Lobber target in 3D, for the purpose of keeping the player occupied with defensive play, while the boss target was about.
I would introduce this target during previous stages to provide some familiarity with the Lobber, which the player could shoot to disarm, or if the Lobber shot a projectile, the player had the opportunity to destroy it before it blew up and occluded the camera view-port for a duration.
Here is that Boss Armour video.