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AA Battery - Week 36

Week 36 has been fairly productive, but I pushed a bit too hard Monday and Tuesday, so I ended up not getting much done for the rest of the week or the weekend. The main new developments are that the troop landing boat is up and running and that we’ve got some explosion sounds now!

2 July - 15 July, 2018

The first part of building the boat was to do the art… after much Googling I settled on this for my reference image: LCM2 Landing Craft

Technically this seems to be a LCM2 landing craft, that is actually designed for landing tanks, but my Googling does suggest that it may have been used for troops as well on occasion…

After finishing the art I basically just needed to implement all the mechanics:

  • Ability to add troops into the boat and still have it float.
  • Boat movement to shore and retreating once the troops are off.
  • Lowering the ramp and triggering the marines to start charging.
  • Spawning of boats once none are active anymore (destroyed or retreated successfully).

The final product looks as follows (the particle effects are spray from a few machine gun rounds I landed nearby):

Close-up of the new boat!

Unfortunately Sas discovered that Unity has a Buoancy effector as part of its 2D physics package, so I need to go rework buyoancy this week to use that instead of what I hacked together myself.

In addition to that the ground troops are also having some difficulty with the slopes introduced in this level, so I need to make a couple of fixes:

  • Troops should turn right side up if they fall over (this happens a lot when the boat slows down suddenly).
  • Troop movement logic needs to have a bit of a feedback loop in it to ensure that the soldier is actually moving… if not acceleration needs to be increased.

Once all of that is done I can put up a pull request and then move on to ripping out my very complex crew system and replacing it with the new simpler one we’ve decided on.

Author

Matt Van Der Westhuizen

Back-end service developer at Ubisoft Blue Byte by day - wannabe game designer & developer by night.