Devlog: shockwaves and trails (Patreon)

Nov 08

I added the shockwave and trail visual effects. The former is simply an uncapped Godot cylinder with a gradient texture, such that the top cap rotates outward while the bottom cap expands lineally to meet it. The trail is a hand-made mesh, extended frame by frame with the global position of the hammer tip bone, such that each slice gradually shrinks and disappears after a set time. I certainly didn't expect to get both effects done in just a few hours. This was almost anticlimactically easy.

Ramming trail

Nov 09

I added pseudo-splines to the trail effect to soften the curves. Whenever I add a new slice to the trail, I interpolate an extra sub-slice at half the distance to the new one, averaging the curve direction between the previous one and the new one. I fear it might be an unnecessary load on the execution though, I want to avoid lag at all costs. So I'll keep it optional, for any players that what to play their low-poly 90s aesthetic game with high-quality graphics.

Also, sometimes the trail misses a frame or two and it becomes visible, so I added a pointy tip to make it look more pleasant to look at. I could also fix the missing frames, but they're caused by how the state machine handles the animations - it can be done, but it's so messy that I'd rather cut corners somewhere else.

The Unity version of the game used a cyclic shockwave to show that the charged attack was ready to release, but I chose to add a blinking glow to the character instead. Using albedo didn't quite work, since that's multiplicative, but emission is additive, so I went that route and now it looks great. I might have to tune it down a little if it annoys photosensitive players, but that's very easy to do. Let me know if there's anything you'd change so far!

Charge glow, attack trail and shockwave