Lazer Fight Behind-the-Scenes Code and Asset Dump

Real quick before we start, there was an animation glitch with the the sheriff that I fixed. I also made it so that his bullet's collisions with the rocks actually have a reaction. This game works now the way it should.

So this turned into a BIG project!

A lot of braincrunching and object building and coding for the object building went into this project. Here's all the code that ended up in the project:

Yup, It's really big. Granted a good portion of it was stuff I learned form the gun fight module. I just needed to do what the lessons said to get the basic template down. The harder parts were when I was when I mixed up some of the mechanics, build original sprites and make whole new animations for them (most of this was not in the lesson, there were changes that I decided to make myself.) I've talked about most of this in previous blog posts but the assets that I posted ended up showing blurry so I blew then up to make them better to look at.

Here are the outlaw and sheriff Animations that I started with:

When I started making the hit reaction frame for the outlaw, I ended up making him a little shorter making a 36x36 Sprite area for that animation so that the hat and gun in the air would fit. I also adjusted the death animation so that the visible arm would reach below the waist. I thought that looked better. Here's the new sprites:

The sheriff is flipped in game to face his opponent. Also, I made some backstep animations by copying the other ones when they were in Construct and reversing them. I talked about that in one of my previous blog posts.

I also made a new ammo system and a health system. I wanted to try out a sci fi theme and give these guys recharging lasers-or lazers as I like to call them. This would add to the mechanics in a new way compared to Gun Fight the original game. I started out by just replacing the bullet markers with lightning bolts and then I decided to make something that looked more like an energy bar and THEN I recolored the symbol in the center to stand out from the rest of it.

I cloned the sprite animation and flipped the clone to use for the Sheriff as well. Next I wanted to make an animation for the recharge effect. To do this I made a tile set in Pyxel Edit. The tile itself would be 1 pixel wide and 8 pixels high-the same height as the BatteryUI. The tile set is 48 tiles wide and 48 tiles high for the width of the BatteryUI sprites. Then I colored in all of the tiles and then cleared tiles by increments of one more for every line of 48 tiles. The result was...well...

2,304 tiles making up a 48x384 pixel animation set. I imported the animation in strips, reversed it so that the animation would start from zero, set it to initially invisible and then placed it over the outlaw's BatteryUI. Also, I made a flipped clone for the Sheriff BatteryUI. Once everything was coded together It looks like this:

I also made a flashing "Overheat" text as well. Then I made a blue clone for the sheriff.

The healthUI is just a regular line of red crosses:

Here's what the hit reaction looks like:

I made two different backgrounds for the game:

The first one had these big grainy dots that didn't look very believable. So I made another one with smaller sometimes less symmetric dots that looked more naturalistic.

I wanted to have music playing over the game-something intense with percussive sounds and some snapping. Beepbox doesn't let you use multiple sounds in a single section so made several tracks using only the percussive section. There were a few different sounds I came up with:

I made a couple different drum sounds before I got something that sounded good. I also made a few different snapping noises. It didn't seem like there was a good potion for it in Beepbox so I just recorded my own snapping and messed around with the pitch in Audacity:

My first track didn't sound that great the cimble sounds like a gong and the sound for the cymbal taps is just a bit to rough to sound right. Also I didn't end up liking the snap sounds I made or even the drum sound.

The snap is to low pitch and the drum sounds like someone patting down a carpet for dust.

I remade the track with a few new sounds that are more crisp and attention grabbing:

The cymbal sounds more like a cymbal and the drum sounds more like a drum. I actually like the drum sounds for this because their similar to the drums in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly score (I haven't seen the movie yet, I just know that one scene where there's a standoff.) The new snap sounds are pretty great too:

The second sound play's underneath the snap to give it a more spacy sound. Here's the final track:

I edited and compiled all my songs together using Audacity. It was pretty easy after watching this tutorial:

The last two things to be added were destructible object and a vehicle that acts like the stage coach in Gun Fight. New destructible object would spawn with every time there was a reset from scoring a point and at the very end of the spawn code a police hovercraft appears and moves up and down the middle of the screen to repel bullets. I chose to make a rock that would become smoldering rubble after several bullet collisions. Here's the animation strip I cam up with:

The object takes 3 shots in the game and the animation progresses each time. After the 3rd shot collisions are deactivated on the object and the animation flips between the 4th and 5th frames to look like smoking flakes:

The vehicle I made is a police hover car:

And here is how it works in-game:

And that's pretty much it. Wow, this turned into a big project for something that I just took a basic of and made some changes to the mechanics and aesthetic. I definitely learned a lot and I hope I get a chance to use what I have learned in the future. Right now I am going into the snake lesson and I'm excited to make something new.

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Extra Blog:

I'm starting to learn about OBS now too. Now I can make actually videos for complex demonstrations instead of just a gif that goes all the way through and resets on it's own. You can look forward to some more of those when I use them in a blog. Here's a few tutorials I've been looking at: