Transmission system Ready !

Hello !

The last two week, I finish the transmission system, I introduce Electric Mind Pulse on Indiedb and a french forum canardpc. I spend more time on this two parts that I though I would.

For the indiedb part, I accumulated multiple mistakes. First of all, I didn’t really understand the rules for posting news ! Now I master them, 6 media (image, sound, gifs…) or a 1 minute video about the game. Then I realize a video would be better than 6 images that show almost the same thing. So I start making a video… I put way too much quality and the time to upload it on youtube was way too long !! Once the video uploaded, youtube has to process it and I decided to cut some parts. Again, it took a load of time that I didn’t expect ! At the end of the week-end, I had a video on youtube and my article validated on indiedb, but I did nothing else… Next time a shorter video and a lower bitrate will help me get this task done faster ! I really thank feillyne from indiedb for his patience !

Then, I start the last gameplay element. The first obstacle was how to draw some straight lines representing my data. I didn’t know if it was possible. As unity doesn’t provide some easy API to draw complex shapes on a image, the puzzle disk is drawn with mesh. But for the transmission system, as there are only straight lines, I wanted to handle it with an image. I though it would be easier to scroll it. So after some search and a little fight with the code, I finally found the way. Then, I gather a short “Bresenham line algorithm” and reuse the randomness system that prepare the disks to draw the transmission texture, and I get my “transmission” drawn.

Disk mesh

The second obstacle was about how to make the infinite vertical scrolling. I use a simple trick, two image moving behind a mask. When the first image is totally out of the mask, I reset it and put it on the bottom of the other.

After that, I had to make the “transmission weakness” appear in red, when fully detected the system allow the player had 4 seconds to activate it. I coded a trigger mecanism and terminated by coding the bonus.

There are 5 random bonuses :

  • Signal boost, add +5 on signal
  • Signal consuption reduction, half signal consuption
  • Improved grid, that accentuate the projection grid contrasts
  • Overload reduction, that increase overload recover speed
  • and a rare bonus that auto-resolve current disk

At first, I was thinking of a more complex system where the player has to click/tap on the red part of the transmission, but what happen if we are playing with keyboard ? So I switch to a more simple approach, the player has to left click, double tap or press space to activate the bonus once recognize by the system.

“Et voila !”

Since, I start to work on sound effects and a dedicated music for the puzzle part. I hope I’ll have something to share next time !

Test in WEBGL