This time we’re going to set up the end game. Fleet support finally get around to sending a dropship to pick up our girls, but they set it down a way away from the bunker. Typical. The Angels will have to break cover and make a last dash under fire for the safety of their waiting transport.
Two Englishmen, alone in the desert and unfamiliar to one another, will politely discuss the weather. I will always believe this to be true.
To create the semblance of a sandstorm in our level we’re going to use the Legend particle system. Particle systems are a method of representing fluid motion behaviour in the clunky and resistant world of real-time 3D polygon rendering. Basically, it works like this: a sprite is an essentially two-dimensional image that exists in the 3D environment. It is programmed to always orthographically face the player’s view, so you can walk around it, jump on top of it or squat-down and look underneath it and it always looks the same. Particle systems eject a number of sprites and then modifies their movement within the game to represent anything from smoke to flames to hopefully clouds of wind-driven sand.
The next event to build is the artillery barrage.
Quick recap: We want to encourage the player to stay around the bunker. Instead of breaking the context and blocking him in with invisible walls we’re going to try and achieve this by blowing the hell out of the surrounding desert with high-explosives, because that’s much more subtle.
The next thing to look at are the triggered events that will mark the passage of time during the hour of play time. First off, let’s look at the creature we mentioned briefly in the plan. Getting some wildlife moving around our map and discovering the ways we can get our prototype NPCs to react to such wildlife sounds like a decent learning exercise.
Sleeves rolled up, this is where the work begins.
Where to start? I looked at Section 1. Figure Out a Backstory as I went along and that’s enough to keep us amused for now. In with Section 2 is the scary notion of changing the player persona so we’ll deal with that in the only sensible way and completely ignore it for the time being.
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