Transition to the ship
I had a concept from somewhere, but I don't know specifically from where, I just remembered the effect, where inside's of some object are shown when you zoom in. So that's why I decided to do it in my game. I want ships to be visible from the outside, so they could have some outside details, not just a ship made of cubes. Right now it's a placeholder model I grabbed from Google's Poly (check it out, it has awesome models for your prototyping needs), but in the future when I have someone to do my art, I will have an array of modular ships where you could attach weapons, upgrades, and lots more. So the effect right now looks like this:
I am willing to share some details on how I did this because there were a lot of people who were interested. It's a very simple solution, yet I had to spend a day to find a solution that I wanted. I followed this tutorial to make myself two shaders: one for the cutout mask, one for the ship's model. The mask in mind looks like this. Then through an accessible shader property and a simple Tween, I modified the Cutoff of the mask based on cameras distance. The shader/script combination in-game looks like this:
Explosions
Everyone who was attentive enough maybe saw my tweets on my effects that I've been doing lately. I was busy doing explosion effects for torpedos and arsenal that Into the Deep will have. I won't go into details about weapons right now, because I didn't do much work on that, just basic prototypes for torpedos, depth charges, and other contraptions. But here's a sneak peek at the explosion effect:
It is not very visible in the GIF but I've added a shockwave effect since the last time. It's more visible in this picture below.
You might also ask how I did this. Well, there is a particle system attached that emits a single particle which scales over time and it has a distort shader attached to it. It's very simple, but I will need to tweak it a bit because it causes some strange artifacts when up close.
Right now explosions have no lasting effect on the ship, but I started implementing leaks and hull damage, so your crew will always have things to do.
Conclusion
What you see right now, I mean the map layout and this dark setting, is a sneak peak of what's to become an intro level for the game. I am building a basis for what's going to be an introduction to the basic control schemes, and interactions aboard the submarine. You are the first ones to see this.
I will continue my work on the game loop. I also want to gather some interest from around the internet and hear different opinions and suggestions that could help me when I feel drained out or lost in the development. So I will be working on game loop related stuff like AI, semi procedural world systems, basic objectives (for now). And when I get tired of those some eye-candy effects, maybe even models for you to see. I DO want to show you something every now and then, but I am too invested in the core system that might seem boring to you :)
I hope I taught you something new today, see you next time!
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