Hacker Highlight: Ace Pilot

Welcome back to another week of Game Dev Club! This week, my Modder members are working on Ace Pilot; a flying simulator where the player has to navigate the skies trying to avoid enemy bullets. Last week, our Guided Hack involved a new spawning system which included enemy waves. This week, we are focusing more on cosmetics and animations rather than game mechanics - though they are all linked together to create the polished and finished game!

 

Today's Guided Hack is adding a smoke effect which appears on the player's plane when they get struck my an enemy pip. The smoke becomes a life indicator which becomes larger and darker the more hits the player takes - neat! To do this we create a smoke asset as well as a smoke variable - with this we can them set the smoke to appear and follow the player's plane's position should our lives every drop below 3. The size is determined by how much life we have; the less lives we have the larger the smoke is. To give the smoke a bit of life and animation, we create a destroy_smoke function which randomly chooses some of the smoke's pixels within its asset to delete. This creates the effect of the smoke moving as it repeats itself, a fun way to do animation without the animation coding blocks

 

We also had the chance to do some of our Python Coding Skills this week include how to create a sprite within Python. One of my members took this coding skill to the next level by adding as many sprites as they could; practising the written code over and over whilst also exercising their pixel art skills in the asset editor. Well done!

Until next time, happy coding!