NEW WEAPON ADDED

We've added a brand new weapon! The SODA BLASTER! This sugary power up allows Kaylee to fire a super charged can of soda that will wipe out any zombie it touches with its explosive fizzy foam!!! It looks pretty, is super satisfying to fire, and makes wiping out zombies  easier than ever before. 

We wanted to add an explosive type weapon that has an area of effect to add some more variety to the weapon pool. The existing weapons have firing modes that feel similar, so we wanted to spice that up a bit. 

Zombies will drop this power up when killed, however its rarer than most the other drops due to how powerful it is. The coolest part is giving it the extra details like having it fire a different can sprite every time you fire it.  and of course its wonderfully rainbow foam fizz explosion put the cherry on the top. I designed a variety of different cans (taking inspiration from some recognizable brands), but changed them plenty enough so we can't get sued..... *disclaimer - all beverages depicted are fictitious and any resemblance to real beverages is purely coincidental.  No fizzy drinks were harmed in the making of this game. 

 

ITS VERY TECHNICAL TOO

The most exciting part of this weapon was figuring out how we can perform an almost "full screen splash" within the world that adheres to the collision and kills the zombies - whilst also not chugging up the game with performance issues.

To achieve this, we decided that a single instance of a "splash" object would handle drawing all the splashes on itself as its own sprite. This gives us the added benefit of being able to randomise different parts of the foam, such as the rotation, colour and opacity.

Ultimately we found the best trick to was to scan outwards in a 360 degree motion at 18 degree intervals. This allows foam to go in 20 different directions. We then simply draw 'foam' at each of the relative points spiraling outwards along that axis until a predetermined distance is reached, or the object touches a wall.

We've slowed down the scan animation below and replaced the foam with red dots. You can see how the effect stops when it hits collision (the bushes) and then also "waves" outwards from the epicenter of the explosion. Naturally there are other forces at play too, such as randomly offsetting the foam on these "collision lines" to make it feel more random.. however we feel we've done a pretty good job at masking this invisible line to make the weapon POP (especially with that satisfying sound effect we added to the explosion!).