Weapons

So, it was time to make a comprehensive weapons system. Up until a few months ago, the player and enemies are just carrying around a pistol that shoots pretty much infinite ammo. I'll keep the full rosta secret but here are some of the weapons to expect in Bad Pixels:

Weapons systems code can get complex, quickly! This took a considerable amount of time to get right, but feels good now. Some highlights include:

• Auto pick up, auto select if first time to carry
• Projectiles stored and non selectable once depleted
• Shared ammo between bullet consuming weapons, like Goldeneye etc.
• Reload remembers ammo amounts per weapon magazine / capacity

One large addition to the weapons system is it is now rendered in the game instead of using hundreds of sprites. This was causing a huge headache and timesink for the project, rendering out multiple angles and animations. Which brings us to our next subject:

Sprites (billboards)

We've overhauled the sprite system so that instead of rendering out hundreds, if not thousands of sprites in a 3D art program, we're now rendering them in Unity directly and drawing them as sprites. While this is very technical, it does take a considerable art pipeline burden off the project that was becoming a massive headache.

2x2 or 4x4?

Another graphical update is we are now using 2x2 dithering, which is closer to the SuperFX look we are aiming for. Bad Pixels is essentially a "what if?" project about the Commodore64 running a SuperFX FPS game.

Dust

Just to inform fans of sandy dust, dust in the game has changed slightly.

Massive Lens Flare

One thing about the game that has bothered me a lot was how crunchy and pixelated the lens flare was (we were using a hack of Unity's stock lens flare system). It was also massive!
So now, it is a custom system rendered in the c64's fullpixel resolution pass over the half pixel 3D. It is smaller, and more well behaved. 

Terrain (where to shoot them)

Bad Pixels was originally set on a flat plane. Pretty boring! So I wrote a terrain system last year to make procgen landscapes. Admittedly, this was a lot of fun but it came with a lot of jank. The system was hard to use, ridden with bugs and defied many sensible concepts of logic! Not something I wanted to bring with me. So... procgen is now off the drawing board. We are back to custom made maps. Once again, without giving the game away, this is all working very nicely now and does what the game needs to do. Also new, 3D skyboxes! The scrolling 2D background was fun but VERY restricting and time consuming to augment. Now we'll have stars going the right way...