This week I mainly worked on a myriad of smaller tasks. Either to patch up or polish existing behaviors or to add new smaller features to the game.
One thing I did was to make sure all renderers (drawable parts) of an object responded to the fog of war. So if an object is in the fog, it and all its GUI layers will be invisible to the enemy teams camera.
I also added a basic GUI setup to the commander, similar to the champion’s. This GUI only displays the commander’s spell cooldowns and total gold as it is, but it still feels nice to have a solid GUI setup for the commander that displays what it’s supposed to display. Some of the other things I worked on this week was applying the new graphics to our map and making the new victory/defeat screen.
The most challenging task I worked on this week was definitely the targeting and rotation of the new tower prefab.
The tower picks up it’s targets from the enemies that enter its attack-trigger sphere. once it has chosen a target it must rotate towards it before it can shoot a projectile. The previous tower we had had only two parts, a head and a body, and the entire head rotated to face its targets.
This new tower our graphical artists has made is significantly more sophisticated. It comes with three parts, a body, a head and a barrel that is attached as a child to the head. The head (along with the barrel) is to rotate only around it’s y-axis, while the barrel is to rotate around it’s local x-axis, set by the direction the head is already turned.
I didn’t manage to get this setup working perfectly. As the barrel is a child object of the head, any rotation of the head will also rotate the barrel and thus deciding the barrels own rotation (independent of the head) is very hard. I did manage to simulate the effect quite well though by letting both the head and the barrel turn smoothly towards their target at the same time. This meant that the barrel got slightly ahead of the head, but it was adjusted automatically once the head stopped rotating.
The Game Design Endevour 