Hidden Areas

After finishing the Player class (for the time being at least), there was quite a few other aspects of the game that were easier to start on. For no reason in particular, I decided to have a look at how we were going to handle the hidden or secret areas in the game. We had already confirmed that we would have an area every now and then that wouldn't be too obvious to start with, but after searching around a little bit, would be revealed. We came to the decision that the best way to achieve this, would be to hide these areas behind regular walls/pipes that surround each level.

For starters, I needed a temporary wall to experiment with and see what would look best for the game. I drew up a very simple and fairly terrible pipe in Photoshop, for what was intended it was fine!


Firstly, I decided to have a look at how I would detect the players proximity to the wall rather than the effect that was going to indicate the secret. Thankfully there is a great function of 'Vector2' called 'Distance'! Using this, all I had to do was specify what distance between the two objects would trigger the effect.

I tried out a couple of different effects on the wall, such as a pulsating effect and one that grows the pipe temporarily. But we settled with what we thought looked best, which is a fading effect on the pipe. For this effect I needed a few new fields, such as an alpha value and a speed at which to fade.

After trying out different speeds and different levels of opacity, I settled with a slow(ish) fade to half opacity when the player is within a certain distance of the pipe.


(You can ignore the end of the relentless enemy in that last picture!)