I also made a couple of changes to my particle system, the main one was adding the ability to align particles left, right, up or down when they’re drawn. This has added a great deal of flexibility in designing the various particle fx which has been the bulk of the work here.
Plasma Rifle
I wanted the first weapon to be pretty close to the feel of the player’s weapon in Defender or Jet Pac (which was probably based on Defender anyway). The actual logic here is pretty simple, a beam is fired and the ‘back’ of the beam moves at a slower rate to the front. Tweaking the particle fx is what took the time and there are three different particle states here, one for the ‘head’ of the beam, one for the ‘tail’, and one for the rings that are formed around it.
I also went through several iterations of the explosion at the end of the beam, going through a bunch of ideas that looked decent but too ‘geometric’ before settling on the version you see here.
Originally I was just performing collision detection for the ‘head’ of the beam but I found this looked a bit weird when enemies moved into the tail and nothing happened to them. Now I also check to see if an enemy has moved into the tail of the beam and apply a smaller amount of damage if they have (based on the theoretical strength of the beam at that point).
Pulse Cannon
I have very fond memories of the two Turok shooters on N64 and my ‘Pulse Cannon’ is somewhat inspired by the ‘Pulse Rifle‘ in those games. It fires rapid bursts of energy with a short delay between each burst.
The mechanics of this weapon were very simple as it’s just basic projectiles moving in a straight line. Again, what took the time was getting the visuals right. here I have a sprite for the centre of the ‘pulse’ and three different particle generators, one for the ring around the pulse and two for its trail.
Spreader
The last of this batch of weapons was originally going to be based on the ‘triple blaster’ found in a bunch of ‘bullet hell’ style 2D SHMUPs. I spent almost a day going down this path and tweaking some ok looking ‘fireball’ style projectiles (well, the particles are OK, the sprites in front looking pretty lame) but, when the weapon was finally done, I was left feeling rather disappointed with the result. It just seemed rather bland and lacked anything to differentiate it from the other projectile-based weapons in the game (of which there are many).
So I went back to the drawing-board and instead engineered a weapon that creates an expanding field of energy. Even after about an hour of experimenting I could tell that this was going to be much more effective, and it was. Of course it took a long time tweaking the particles again but there’s only two different generators here so less than the previous two weapons.
I didn’t like the energy field just fading out at full ‘spread’ as I felt this looked a bit weird, so instead I made it contract back to a point which seemed to look pretty cool. The damage done by the field of energy is based on how much of the enemy overlaps the field and how concentrated the field is at that point, focussing the field at the end therefore also has implications in the use of the weapon as it means that damage done is super-concentrated at that point.
I’ll probably re-use the original ‘spreader’ bullets for a bespoke enemy weapon or something later in the game. I suspect I haven’t given up tweaking some of these effects either, particularly the plasma rifle – I like it but there’s still something that’s not quite sitting right with me. I think I may like my original version better in some respects.
Also, ‘spreader’ is a bit of a shite name for a weapon. Sound more like something you use to plaster walls or make a toasted sandwich. Must think of something better.
Dev Time: 4 days
Total Dev Time: approx 132.5 days
The Original Plasma Rifle
The Current Plasma Rifle
The Pulse Cannon
The Original (Shit) Spreader
The Reworked Spreader
Some Gratuitous Action With The New Weapons
The BitBull Blog 
2 Comments
How about something like “Particle Shotgun” or “Ion Blast”?
Hey – thanks for the feedback – I really like both ‘particle’ and ‘ion’, ‘particle’ seems particularly appropriate here. I was also trying to get in something that communicated the action of the weapon like ‘sweep’ (someone else suggested ‘net’) but neither of these really sound aggressive enough to me.
Maybe just ‘particle gun’ would do it? Or ‘particle beam’. I’m working on a ‘gamma ray’ at the moment so I can’t use ‘ray’!
Actually how about ‘particle storm’ – that’s pretty cool?
One Trackback
[…] For the plasma rifle I felt the old effect was too overblown so went for something rather simpler using a shader rather than particles. The new effect is just one sprite drawn with a custom shader that renders a fade with a low ‘bit depth’ to look pixelated. It also draws small gaps between the (imaginary) pixels. I much prefer the result and it’s considerably more akin to the player’s weapon in Defender which is what I was going for. You can see the original here. […]