Power Golf Arena
Flying Drones
I also worked on the flying drones scattered across the map, acting as cameras to further invoke the feeling of this game being a big event.
There are three different types of drones. The first type circles around the map and I made it the cameras will be evenly spaced no matter how many you ad. The second flies across the map randomly between points across the map. The drone will travel to an unoccupied point and sit there for a couple of seconds before moving on. The third type will randomly appear on the map in the beginning of a round and will fly across the map and drop bubbles or bouncy goop.
Wanna Play?
Code
About
Think golf is a boring game? A game only rich, white middle-aged men play? Well not in this action packed, chaotic and extreme take on golf where the goal is not to hit a hole, but each other. Use a plethora of different golf balls and clubs scattered across the map to destroy your opponents. The winner however is not the player with the least number of points, but the one gathering the most. More complicated shots will earn you more points and the one reaching the goal first will be celebrated in a roaring crowd.
This project was a nine-week project made in unity for PlayStation 4.
What I Worked On
Items
During this project I spent most of my time working on the items and spawning said items. An item platform is chosen randomly at an interval and will then spawn a random item. The system is modular so a platform can be placed and added to the spawning system really easily. You can also customize which platforms spawns which items.
There are two different types of items: clubs and balls. The club item needs to be activated before a shot and the ball item needs to be activated during a shot. As we were planning on having a lot more items, I made it so it's quite easy to add more. You just have to create an effect and then add it to and item.
Creating all the different items was really fun and it is what I enjoyed most from the project. I also learned a lot about item systems and how to create managers for spawning stuff or controlling objects.
Points System
The second biggest thing I worked on was the points system. This was probably the hardest part for me as we reworked how the points worked a lot and I was also met with a lot of complications.
The player can collect potential points by flying through the air or hitting other players. You can also get a multiplier by bouncing on walls. If you have hit a player and your ball has stopped, your potential points will be added to the round score which is then multiplied and afterwards it will be added to your total points.
This part of the code I had to rewrite a lot as sometimes the points didn't get counted correctly or sometime not counted at all. The multiplier also had some issues and at one point the counter froze the entire game. If I would do this again, I would set up a much cleaner system for counting the points but due to time constraints I didn't get the chance.
UI
I also got to work on some of the UI for the game, like the mini map, the points and the pop-up text. This was really fun and although I would like to focus on gameplay I wouldn't mind working more with UI in the future.
The mini map was the most difficult as we couldn't use a secondary camera as we were using HDRP which drops the frames like crazy with more than one camera. Instead, I took the players and items position relative to each other and translated it into a 2D position on the mini map. I did use a secondary camera for the background by rendering the first frame in the game to a render texture and then disabling it.
For the points and the popup text I spend most of my time experimenting with how to place and animate the text, so it felt smooth and looked good and I really like how it came out.
