This week I have design, code in and implemented a feedback system with a particle system for when an enemy gets hit by our power-up bullets.
I have done this with the help of art provided to me by our artist Felipe and googling ways to code this in into unity. This was also done with much trial and error from my part as I am not a programmer.
The way the code works is just by instantiate a specific game object that I made with the particle system that already exists in unity. There is already code before I did this that will delete that enemy after it is hit by the power-up projectile.
I had to take the sprite art that Felipe made for me and make it a material and add that to the particle system renderer. This in turn made it so that it would play after the enemy was hit by the power-up projectile.
Why I did this was to help with some of the stuff that we had gotten back from the latest playtest. This was about the feedback from the power-up. As we wanted the player to feel powerful when using the power-up the idea of adding in a big effect for kills with this weapon felt like the way to go from a design point of view. As this would provide the player with a visible feedback on a kill that they made. Doing it in this way also made it so that we did not really have to change the way the power-up worked as some of the comments we got where: “It does not seem that powerful” and other comments in that manner.
Instead of adding a AOE damaging bullet or some other type of effect like that. That would have taken too much effort to rebalance the game and many new lines of code.
At first when I worked on the new feedback system I was just using a small blood sprite that Felipe had made for me but this was something that felt a bit to small so I asked for some more art specifically some fish bones to “spice up” the effect. By adding in this small extra particle effect as part of the first on the effect became much more visceral and satisfying.
This was all in all a productive week.
Selfish a designers work, by Joel Ahlgren 
Great to see that you, as a designer, are working with all parts of the game, such as wave design, menus and power-ups. But that you are also working across disciplines with implementing art, particles and code. I really like that you are not afraid poking around in all parts of the project. From my point of view that is an important trait of game designer.
Another positive things is seeing that you and your team are working on implementing changes based on some of the feedback you gained from the play-test sessions. To me it would be interesting to know more about the subject. For example, why did you decided to work with this particular feedback compared to others.
Based on time restriction and scope it interesting to see how you choose one option over another. This kind of knowledge and insight I find really interesting because it displays, at surface level, how it’s going for the group and how you are reasoning.
On a general note, I found myself having to reread some sentences which unfortunately diminishes part of the reading experience. It’s minor errors but maybe have a team member proof-read in order to improve the quality.
I’m looking forward to seeing the final version of your game. Best of luck.
By the way, I just noticed that parts of the website are in Swedish. Since the posts are in English you should probably change that so it’s uniformed.
GillaGilla