Wind Up Robot & Other Discoveries

Well I've had quite the busy weekend with all sorts of tweaking going on and trying to figure out new stuff. One thing that had always been bugging me very badly about my blood splats effects was that because I'm using a top down projector to instantiate blood splats whenever my enemies are killed by "Bud the Spud" although it left behind a very nice blood splat effect that formed well against uneven terrain what would happen was if another enemy say was following close behind and would walk through the blood splat the projector would also project that blood splat on top of the enemy which looked very odd. Also when my enemies died and left behind a "Fertilizer Pellet" for Bud to pick up they too would be covered in blood from the instantiated projector, which I did not mind so much, but my other enemies passing through the effect, well that was another matter and did bother me quite a bit. I discovered over the weekend that if I place my game characters onto another layer like the "static" layer for instance and tell my projector to ignore that layer then it works perfectly. I guess I could make a new layer and call it "Characters" for simplicity. But in any event it works so now my projectors no longer cast a blood splat on top of my enemy characters if they pass through a nice gooey looking blood splat on the floor, How cool is that?

Next up was the challenge of creating my "Wind Up Robot" to patrol around in the Tree House for level 03. I wanted to be able to have him wander back and forth between "Auto Way Points" but I also wanted him to emit sparks that can hurt Bud if he gets hit by them... you might recall me mentioning that was my goal? Well it took me the better part of the day to get it working but I finally got it just how I want it using the "Walker Boys AiPatrol Script." I had to make some changes like "Tag" robot with a name; "robot" and then in the "Controller Collider Hurt Script" I had to add a few if statements and add a few Variables to the "Ai Patrol Script" and Viola! Success!

That particle effect for his sparking lightning bolts was fun too, I might tweak it a little more to add a secondary effect for a small shower of sparks to accompany the lightning bolts, I'll see ;) But what I've got works very well and now I have a walking wind up toy robot that will patrol and inflict damage, he does not attack Bud deliberately as he is simply a wind up toy but he'll dish out a good 35 damage which more than makes up for his lack of intelligence ;)