Week of 3/23

Hi all, hope everyone had a good Spring Break last week! With almost a week of work since then, I've made a few changes.

My first change this week was adding shadows to the game. This was something I simply hadn't looked at when creating our light source initially, and it didn't take too long to implement. It was pretty much as simple as checking "soft shadows" in the options for our player's point light, and then finding an intensity that looked good. The only kink I really had to work out was making sure the player itself didn't cast a shadow, since we don't want the entire area above and below the player obscured. The result changes our view from this:

 To this:

Exciting, I know! My second change, as you may already see, was the introduction of our health bar. This was something I've been meaning to do for a while, but I didn't know exactly how I wanted to do it since there is no "maximum" amount of health for us. So, what we decided on is a recreation of the light source inside our lamp, stretched out across the bottom of the screen. I think that this helps with the idea that the player's health and light are one and the same. The bar's shrinking and growing is controlled by a few lines added to our PlayerController. Since the player already had health, I simply added lines to increase or decrease the lifetime of the particles in the bar when the player gains or loses health. This is the bar at the start of our level:

And after picking up those four fireflies:

 See you next week!