The BitBull Blog

When I set up the placeholder for this one ages ago it was called ‘Storm Bringer’ and I had an idea it was going to involve some kind of ‘particle storm’ type effect, a bit like those fireworks you get that fire out a ton of different sparks that go off in different directions.

However, I’ve already changed the ‘Spreader‘ weapon to be called ‘Particle Storm’ and, as that now does something very similar to what I intended this weapon to do, differentiating this weapon proved difficult.

I tried a series of variations with a bunch of particles moving in a constrained and stuttery ‘Brownian Motion’ type manner but this all looked shite and, to be honest, given that I’ve done so many of these weapons now I was beginning to feel like I was running out of ideas and motivation.

Then came a random source of inspiration. In my very skunkworks home studio I have a rack for audio gear that I’ve cobbled together over the years from various shitty pieces of Ikea furniture and stuff. In an attempt to make this more uniform (as nothing matched and my workmanship was so terrible) I covered the entire piece with Jack Kirby art from a bunch of old Spiderman and Fantastic Four comics I had as a kid.

On one small section of this there’s an image of a character disappearing into a kind of black hole, the image is drawn in negative and looks really striking. I had vaguely considered a weapon called ‘Black Hole’ (though I was worried it would be too similar to the ‘Sonic Boom‘) so I decided, largely out of desperation, to try switching the particles I was using to very dark circles with a light outline. I thought this would look ridiculous but, to my surprise, it actually looked kind of cool!

It’s not a single black hole though, so I hit upon the concept of a weapon that fires a series of mini black holes that suck the life force from enemies. Stephen Hawking would probably turn in his grave but I liked the idea. I’m calling it the ‘Black Hole Blaster’ which, thankfully, just about fits in the space I’ve reserved for weapon names in the HUD!

I worked on this ‘negative space’ effect some more, adding a layering system to my particle code so that I could draw all the white outlines ‘behind’ the black circles, this gave the effect of a unified black mass with a white outline which looked much better than a bunch of circles overlaid. As usual there was a lot of tweaking and messing around here (I didn’t really have any point of reference for the effect I was trying to create other than that one comicbook panel) but I’ve ended up with something I think works.

There’s five layers of particles in the final version two sets of black circles with light outlines (one smaller than the other) and the concentric circles you see overlaid which (I think) help to give the impression of some kind of black hole rather than simply black smoke. It was difficult to get these concentric circles subtle enough to suggest ‘black hole’ without overwhelming things, I had to do a lot of messing around with the frequency and distribution of them. It’s possible that I’ve erred to much on the side of caution and could do with a few more of them. It does look a bit like some kind of weird satanic flamethrower but I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing!

Lastly, whilst working on the collision detection (which was very straightforward) I thought it might be a nice touch if these mini black holes exerted a small gravitational force, actually sucking enemies towards them. This was pretty fiddly to code, and my initial version was ludicrously powerful, but it did seem to work and help to differentiate this weapon nicely from some of the others.

So I think I’m pretty much done with this one now. I’m really pleased with it, both in the way it looks, but also for the fact I’ve never seen a weapon quite like it in any other game (though some smartarse will no doubt point one out to me)!

Only two weapons left to go!!

Dev Time: 2 days
Total Dev Time: approx 140.5 days

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