The BitBull Blog

This past few days has been 50% pushing pixels and 50% working on shaders for the weapon effects I decided I wasn’t really happy with.

For the grenade launcher I designed a new grenade as I felt the old one was really pretty shite in the cold light of day. Instead of a more ‘traditional’ type of grenade I went for something that looked a bit more sci-fi and this seemed to work better right off the bat. I probably only spent about half an hour doing it (if that) which is ridiculous compared to the amount of time I spent tweaking the previous version. You can see the original here.

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.

The particle storm (originally ‘spreader’) is a weapon that’s caused me much pain and grief. The original effect (which you can see here) wasn’t bad at all but I felt it seemed a bit clunky compared to the other weapons, too pixelated or something. The new version adds a new sprite at each frame which is drawn with a custom shader to give a blend effect, there’s also some particles that decay very fast at the front of the ‘beam’. To be honest I’m still not 100% satisfied with this but I think it’s much better than the original. I’ll probably come back to this (yet again) at a later date but for now I’m parking it. It’s in the right ballpark now at least.

The pixel-pushing I had to do was drawing version of all the ‘futuristic’ weapons for the upgrade screens. I really don’t have clue what I’m doing with this type of pixel art and the process often feels akin to a monkey trying to write Hamlet by bashing out random keys on a typewriter. It might have been easier if I’d have sketched the weapons out by hand first, the fact that I had no real point of reference for what they should look like made things even harder!

I’m pleased with the end results though I think. The particle storm is maybe still a bit weird (that weapon’s been a bastard to get right all round). I’m also a bit undecided about the pulse cannon – it looks fairly badass in most respects but there’s something about it that reminds me of whale(!) which I don’t really like.

I’m particularly pleased with the gamma ray and sonic boom but in some respects these were the easiest as I was referencing common retro sci-fi tropes.

Dev Time: 3 days
Total Dev Time: approx 152 days

previous | next