Trail Renderers and Particle Effects

Basically, what I did this week for our game was implementing the effects system for when a hero is attacking as well as actually making contact with someone on an attack.  Basically, how the system works, is that there is a list on each hero move that contains the particle effects for when the move actually makes contact with another collider, and the other list contains trail renderer game objects that are instantiated when the player uses the specific move it's attached to.  This is then cleaned up when the animation is finished.  I might want to do some more work on the clean up to make it look smoother later on, but it seems to be working pretty well, especially for this point in time.  I have a cool video that I made with fraps in order to show, but blogspot is having a difficult time accepting the video for some reason.

Week 2

This week was pretty successful for me.  I managed to finish up the panel breaking system.  It now adds an explosive force from the center of the character when they reach the breaking velocity and ram into the side of the panel.  This then, based on an explosion radius, pushes any blocks (or panel pieces when we get the art in there) away from the character simulating they being "thrown" from the comic panel and into another one.  Some of this will change and I might have to tweak a few things when the art gets in and the designers start playing around with the system, but it's working great so far.

The other thing I started working on this week was exploring the idea of trail renderers and particle effects on the heroes' limbs when they attack and connect an attack, respectively.  With the way the code is set up so far, I can instantiate the particle effect or trail renderer from a list of prefabs on the scripts that control the animations and inputs, but I need to ask Adam about how that actually connects with his code.

Week One

So this week was mostly just getting started on the project.  My duties this week included two different things.  The first was that I needed to go through the code and start learning the code base and how everything works.  I think I have a good idea on how this works, but I still need to work with it some more.

My second job this week was to start exploring some physics calculations for breaking away the panels on the side of the level. The basic idea was that, upon some (to be determined) event, one of the players will break through a panel frame and into another panel.

There were a few different things I explored while working with this concept.  The first issue was what type of panel frame should we use which can either be 2D planes or a 3D Game Object.  Personally, I think either one will work, but I personally enjoy the look of the 2D planes.  In the end, this will be more of a design choice than mine depending on how they want it to look.

The second thing I explored was how to do the physics.  The two choices here are basically use unity's .addExplosionForce() method or to create and fake our own physics.  I played around with unity's physics system for a while and I managed to get some interesting looking effects (based on the objects I had which were essentially just cubes and planes), but we can probably get a more controlled looking panel break if we fake the physics.