GameDev Blog: Goblin Rules Football #14: Trailer and Sprinting Indicators

Last post, I mentioned that I was going to make a trailer for my game. I did! It only took a few hours and I did it all using free tools and free (Create Commons) music. Can you tell this is the first time I’ve ever edited video of any kind???

Wow, isn’t it amazing? You can find it on the steam store page for Goblin Rules Football now! Remember to add to your wish list (please…)!

The other thing I did this past week was add a new visual indicator to let player’s know when a goblin is sprinting versus running normally. Before, you could only notice that a goblin was sprinting because their stamina bar started going down (and they moved a little bit faster). Now, though, there’s a little cloud of dust/smoke? that trails behind their feet when they sprint. It looks like this:

The dust shoots back a bit, rises, and then disappears. I used a particle effect attached to each goblin to do it. During any running animation, their is an “Animation Event” used to play a sound for the footsteps. I reused that event to also check if the player is sprinting (and not fatigued) and if they are, to also play a burst of the sprinting dust. The code for this is pretty simple. Make a check for isSprinting and !isFatigued, then use the “.Play()” method on the attached particle system.

if (this.isSprintingOnServer && !this.isFatigued)
	sprintParticleSystem.Play();

I used the below tutorial, “Dust Effect when Running & Jumping in Unity [Particle Effect]” by Press Start to get me started on how to make the effect. I played around with mine a bit to get it to look the way I wanted. I added some noise and brute force the numbers/options to make it look a certain way (I had no idea what I was doing).

So, anyway, now there’s a dust cloud/trail when you sprint! I always tried to add “speed lines” around sprinting characters, like you’d see in an anime or something, but I couldn’t get it to look all that great so I dropped it.

Also spent a lot of time on trying to improve my “has ball” visual indicators, but they all failed so I went back to just the “BALL” tag above the head and the white/yellow indicator at the goblins feet. Oh well. Not the first wasted effort while making this game, and it certainly won’t be the last.

The other changes I made were:

  • Defense power up prevents slide tackles from tripping you
  • You can dodge a bomb’s explosion by diving

The rationale for the first one is that the defense power up wasn’t that useful before. It just reduced damage, but the real way player’s steal the ball from you and mess you up is with a well timed slide tackle. Now, if you have the defense power up active (the shield particles are still around you) then you won’t trip from a slid tackle. You still take a small amount of damage, which could knock you out, but there is no auto-trip.

For the “dive to dodge a bomb,” I felt that bombs were a little too powerful. To make them useful at all, I shortened the fuse time. However, this made it really powerful and nearly impossible to dodge even if you see it coming. So, now if you are diving during an explosion you won’t get hurt by it. Why? Mostly as a way to try and balance bombs. If you see one coming, and you react in time, you can save yourself. Because you are diving, though, you still have a slow down effect after the dive so it’s not a complete counter to the bomb. It’s just better to survive and be slowed down than to be knocked out instantly. Also, diving to dodge an explosion makes it seem like you’re a cool action hero diving away from a grenade that for some reason creates a fiery explosion in a 50 foot radius.

Next Steps…

I don’t know, dude. Maybe convert the game from Mirror’s KCP transport to the Steamworks transport? Start working on steam achievements? Still a lot of work to do on the game, but with the core gameplay mostly “done” it’s hard to know what direction to go in. I can figure it out someday!

Smell ya later nerds!