Hey it's kind of a game now

Well, after tinkering with how weapon targeting/firing works, Enemy ships are now firing back at the player's ship.  I also created a HUD indicator for shield health that seems to be cooperating nicely, and fixed a few previously existing bugs as well.  I purchased an effects package off of the asset store today and plan on working one or two of those effects into the game over the next day or two.  It should look rather nice assuming they don't cause a slowdown on mobile devices (I can dream, can't I?).

Something else I've been putting off doing for a while now: I updated my version of Unity3D to 4.2.whatever and converted the project over as well.  Overall it was an easy process, except now some of the transparent/cutout shaders I've been using aren't so transparent all the time.

This used to work, I swear.

I also came up with an idea for how to do away with what currently happens when a ship dies (aka big bland explosion).  I'm thinking that combining this with something like this will lead to some nice looking ship debris.  At the very least, it will allow me to procrastinate from getting a text-dialogue-box-system set up.

Explosion effects are just more fun.

Small update

Took care of a few bugs caused by switching to using prefabs.  I'm able to swap out the enemy ships with a button press now.  No shmancy pictures this time.

More progress

About 2 weeks ago I got shields working.  (Changing the texture offset gives it a nice animation effect as well).  It does nifty things when it gets hit like making changes to the opacity to make it appear more alive. Intuitively, once the shield is destroyed, the ship will be vulnerable for a period of time before the shield charges again.  Missiles currently get stopped by shields as well, but that will probably change later on.  I plan on having a HUD indicator of the shield's status either inside or surrounding the current HP display.

I also finally decided on an object hierarchy for the ships themselves and started saving a few as prefabs.  A few other things will need to be reworked to be able to use them after adding them at run time, but that will be a rather major milestone taken care of once completed.

The next step big goal after that milestone is to get the enemy ships weapons and let them fire back for a change instead of the constant slaughter it's been so far.  I'm think I coded the existing weapon systems (which will eventually be featured in another post) in such a way that will make it an easy process, but I won't know for sure until I start coding that part.