This has been another exciting and busy week now that we've entered the early production phase of development! The art department has been busy toiling away creating all types of visual goodies to start attaching to some of our basic framework. One thing I've been having a lot of fun with in particular lately is designing and developing particle effects for different scenarios. I really wanted the item spawning Chest I made to be a bit more exciting, and decided I was going to add a little "poof" effect when your item is revealed. I feel like something quick and stylistic like this adds so much life to interactable objects.

I continued on, making effects with Unity's standard particle system, and the newer VFX Graph, for bullet ricochets, blood splatter/hit effect, and muzzle flashes (wip). There's even more I have planned, but some are more pertinent than others in developing the look and feel of combat and the game feel as a whole. This blood effect will be small and combined with a screen shake effect when the player takes any type of damage. Similarly, this effect could be used to signal an affirmitive hit on an enemy, and may be colored green or something to differentiate a little.

Another small detail that was implemented, that I feel has a huge impact on the feel and style of the game is the bullet object and trail renderer components added to them. Obviously better than a placeholder sphere. This was a small bullet akin to the way they're depicted in traditional comics. The trail renderer just has a soft yellow-white glow based on it's velocity.

There have also been some big improvements and polish in the realm of our enemies and monsters. For one, our current enemies now have some better animations and we have a basis for their programmatic behavior, so they know to pursue the player and precisely when to attack. Below is my little tentacle creature now with it's idle, attack and death patterns.

The last thing I completed this week that I believe is another monumental facet of our combat, is how objects assets are to be randomly generated throughout each room in the level. For now, only a few variations of a stone pillar are being instantiated, but this should make rooms feel fuller and busier as more assets get added into this layer of procedural generation. This was achieved by creating an invisible object in the middle of every room, set a distance above anything else. This empty object sends a clamped random number of raycasts in random directions, and then casts downwards to check if there is in fact terrain there that it can instantiate an object on top of. If not, it does not, but repeats this process until a certain number of objects are instantiated in each room.