Hello, it's Wes again. In my last post, I explained that I wanted to make a multiplayer space trading game. Now it's time to show off what I have accomplished so far. The Universal, which is the game that has inspired me to make this one, was a full 3d space experience. I don't think I could replicate that myself and I want to see some progress so I opted for another approach. I'll refer to this as subspace mode. The game will be played from a topdown view. Maybe in the future if I can put together a dev team, I can do a full 3D experience. Another factor that made me decide to do this is that subspace mode would make things easier to setup for mobile devices. I want to give players a chance to play on whatever platform they want.
What have I accomplished?
The first thing I did was make a ship sprite in Inkscape. It's a very basic placeholder for a ship. I also made a lazer sprite for later on when I add weapons. Then I opened Unity, set things up for how I want them, and I added the sprites to the project. I setup some basic rotational controls and I used Unity's built in UI system to make on screen sliders as input for thrust and steering. It took a bit of trickery to get it working how I wanted and now I'm happy with it. I made a script so the camera will follow the player and I threw in a temporary background so I could confirm that everything is working as I want. I also added a "Fire" button to the bottom right of the screen and linked it to the playership's Fire() function. Here's a screenshot of me flying around using the on-screen controls. The forest background is just to show movement because a solid colored background won't.
What's next?
The next thing I will be working on is a weapon firing system. I want weapons to be swappable and even though I'm only going to have two different weapons(red and green lazers) to start with, I want to ensure that I can add and swap weapons easily in the future. Lazer weapons will deplete a rechargable energy bar, so there's that to consider aswell. Also, I need to add a healthbar to the ship. Then, it will be a good time to start making this space game actually look like it is in space. I'll either make a parallaxing starfield or I'll use a 3D skybox and some programming magic to make it look nice. Once I get a little further into development, I'll upload some videos.
Anyways, it's time for me to get back to work. I hope you've enjoyed reading. Thank you for your support!
In case you missed it, here's my previous post about the game.
https://steemit.com/gaming/@wes773/join-me-on-my-game-making-adventure