Wool is the fuel available on GooglePlay

My latest game is a bit retro, it's like the classic old Defender game. 

It uses my system for Parallax scrolling the backgrounds, you get a HUD to see what alien is going for your sheep.

It has been written in Unity 3D,

I've written all the music myself in Ableton Live 9 lite.

For the sound effects I've used SONiVOX's Twist & Wobble.

The animations were made in Spriter by BrashMonkey the backgrounds and explosions were from their art packs.

Here is the video

Saving 2 sheep with AZ

I was playing my game wool is the fuel and wanted to record a video of the game play. So I downloaded AZ screen recorder.

After a few seconds I had recorded this snippet.

I liked it because it also records the audio all be it from the speakers though. My previous phone had great speakers but after my cat Clicquot decided to bite through the screen, I had to get a new one (phone that is not cat).

Wool is the fuel mecanim

I've just uploaded a video showing some of the game play and animations in my Wool is the fuel defender style game.

When developing I used single frame animations to test the mecanim to see that all the states worked. For the Landers, I used different colours to represent each of the states. Then when I was sure it all hung together nicely I created the animations.

Lander mecanim

Drag an image onto the Hierarchy then click Window->Animation

Click add property then click the plus on the right

I use Spriter by Brashmonkey to do the animations, I know I can create the animations directly in Unity and it has advantages with regard the colliders, but for simple animations I still use Spriter.
Also I love all of the effects they have already created for us, look at the video to check them out.

Unity's Event trigger component

So I was adding my buttons to the game using UI event sytem in Unity.

The Fire and Flip where easy but when it came to the Thrust button I hit a snag. The button click is not enough I need it to respond when the button stays pressed.

To do this I needed to add Event Trigger component to the button.

 

Then in the component click add new event type for Pointer Down and Pointer Up. 

Here is the code for the 2 functions:

    public void ThrustDown()

    {

        IsThrust = true;

    }

    public void ThrustUp()

    {

        IsThrust = false;

    }

Then in the FixedUpdate() check if IsThrust then increase the speed, also I’ve added the code to slow down the player over time with the Speed * .99f:

        if (IsThrust)

        {

            Speed += thrustAmount;

            if (Speed > MaxSpeed)

                Speed = MaxSpeed;

        }

        Speed = Speed * .99f;

Mutant aliens

When an alien takes a sheep up to the top of the screen it shears the sheep and becomes a fast moving alien mutant. 

What I want is for the mutants to go after the player. To do that we subtract the 2 positions vectors, giving us the difference between the 2 points. I wanted to use that to then set the direction of the mutant. I discovered there is a function normalized that does just that, so here is the code from the FixedUpdate() to do that. By placing it in the FixedUpdate it will continually change course towards the player.

if (IsMutant)

{

    var delta = player.transform.position - transform.position;

    direction = delta.normalized;

}

Aliens take sheep to top then change into Mutants

Attack Waves

In defender all of the baddies don’t all arrive at once there are a number of waves per level. So to do that when instatiating the baddies I'll have a delay between them.

In a previous blog on the development of Rhino roll I used Editor scripting to help create the levels. So I’ll do the same here again. 

Here is my code to create an array of objects in the editor script.

    static void ObjectsToArray(string objType)

    {

        var Code = "private Vector2[] " + objType + " = new Vector2[] {";

        var objs = Selection.gameObjects.OrderBy(go => go.transform.position.x);

        bool IsFirst = true;

        foreach (var item in objs)

        {

            if (!IsFirst)

                Code += ", ";

            else

                IsFirst = false;

            Code += string.Format("new Vector2({0:0.000f}, {1:0.000f})", item.transform.position.x, item.transform.position.y);

        }

        Code += "};";

        print(Code);

    }

Here is the code to add the Menu Items to the IDE of Unity and call the function 

    [MenuItem("Adz/Util/SheepToArray")]

    static void SheepToArray()

    {

        ObjectsToArray("Sheep");

    }

    [MenuItem("Adz/Util/LandersToArray")]

    static void LandersToArray()

    {

        ObjectsToArray("Landers");

    }

The idea is to move the landers aboout, duplicate new ones et.c. then select them all and call the LandersToArray function, like below.

Here is the code automatically generated by the function call. Saves so much time when designing levels, in my opinion.

    void Level1Wave1()

    {

        Vector2[] Landers = new Vector2[] { new Vector2(-48.800f, -0.140f), new Vector2(-42.200f, 1.560f), new Vector2(-11.880f, -1.120f), new Vector2(-5.680f, -0.440f), new Vector2(-0.080f, 2.320f), new Vector2(0.020f, -1.850f), new Vector2(3.500f, 1.560f), new Vector2(24.200f, 0.960f) };

        Vector2[] LanderDirections = new Vector2[] { new Vector2(-0.240f, -0.074f), new Vector2(-0.933f, -0.997f), new Vector2(0.489f, -0.842f), new Vector2(0.702f, -0.403f), new Vector2(0.700f, 0.146f), new Vector2(-0.497f, -0.331f), new Vector2(-0.186f, 0.392f), new Vector2(-0.868f, 0.386f) };

        DoLanders(Landers, LanderDirections, .02f);

    }

Then in the fixed update add the code to invoke these functions after a given time.

        if (CurrentWave < Waves.Length)

        {

            Waves[CurrentWave]--;

            if (Waves[CurrentWave] == 0)

            {

                CurrentWave++;

                var wave = string.Format("Level{0}Wave{1}", CurrentLevel, CurrentWave);

                Invoke(wave, 0f);

            }

        }

As before here is a video to demonstrate. It has 2 attack waves from the aliens. I haven't done any fancy animations for the materialisation yet.

Wool is the Fuel

A couple of years ago I created my 1^st game, it was Wool is the Fuel.  The idea of the game was that Space ships are powered by wool, so the aliens come to earth and shear the sheep. Originally I was going to have cows, as those aliens can’t resist a bit of cow mutilation, however I thought that wasn’t very child friendly, so as sheep shearing isn’t as murdery I’d go with that.

It was written using XNA and took a number of months. I then rewrote it in Unity in 2 weeks but I scrapped the game as it really was quite rubbish.

Now having written a number of games I’m returning to the idea of Wool is the Fuel. I’m going to combine Wool is the fuels with a game I always loved Defenders. The idea in Defender is that you have to protect your colony of humans from a bunch of aliens. The aliens arrive in waves and after you have cleared all the waves you have completed a level. As the level number goes up so does the difficulty.

So instead of humans, you have to protect your sheep. Also no sheep will be harmed in the playing of this game they cannot die, even after falling from a great height.

My Rhino Roll game has the code for the parallax scrolling backgrounds, so I will reuse that but allow the changing of direction. To do this I add a Collier to the Left and right of the Main camera, when it hits a tile it moves it over to the opposite direction.

When moving right the left collider in green moves A tile to right

When moving left the right collider in green moves E tile to left

As with the Rhino Roll game I am going to have multiple layers of background so you can see the parrallax scrolling.

For the backgrounds I'm using the Delta essentials pack from Spriter by BrashMonkey.

 Videos of Scrolling in action