Garden 2 September updates

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Hardpoint sprites in Unreal

After importing the hardpoint sprites to Unreal and attaching them to the gunship I noticed that I had programmed the hardpoints to work as 3D objects. Meaning that for example rotation of the hardpoints wouldn't match with the sprite animation. I figured that in the case of rotation, each animated frame would have to be assigned it's own sector which would then be picked depending on the rotation. Wanting to move on instead of getting stuck experimenting, I decided to skip this for now and use a single sprite to represent the hardpoints and have that sprite rotate which looks fine except for the extremes of the rotation.

Hardpoint rotated to face the right extreme.

In an ideal situation I would probably have the ship and it's hardpoints made as simple 3D meshes with pixel-style textures.

Effect sprites & light emissions

Before I went to work on remaining character sprites, I did most of the sprites for the effects used in the boss battles. I wanted the effects to have some kind of glow effect so I looked for a way of doing that.
 
The process I used for the glowy sprites starts with creating emission version of the sprite where everything aside from the glowing parts are removed. The glowing parts luminosity is then given value of how much glow it should have. In Unreal the emissive version of the sprite is then assigned to the original sprite as additional texture.

Sprite and emission map for the explosion effect.

In addition a custom material that has desired settings for emissive color is needed. In this case we want to have glow strength and glow color as editable parameters for the emission. An instance of the glowing sprite material is assigned to each effect's sprite so we can edit the settings for effect, for example the explosion's glow strength is 1 and color is yellow similar to the one in the sprite.

Part that handles the emissive color of the custom material.

All that's left as this point is to see how the emissions look in game and adjust the emissive sprites and settings if necessary.

Sprite emission in action during gameplay.