We Have Flamethrowers [Almost]

This week it's been back to creating things to give players a bit more of a chaotic experience once they've got to grips with the core mechanics of the game. This week's selection of environmental hazards? Fire!

The flame throwers are wall mounted and activated by the player coming within semi-close proximity of them. To give a visual indicator to the player that the flame throwers are about to start firing at them, they would need to animate out of the wall as if to arm themselves.

I decided to share this in a progress update as the flame thrower is a pretty good example of how a few primitive shapes can be transformed into something more thematic and visually appealing with an albedo texture and a normal map.

Asset creation can be a rather demotivating task at times; particularly when spending a lot of time and effort and it not looking how you want it to look. I thought I'd show how this progressed as an example of why it's worth just taking it a step at a time and not focusing in on it not looking great right away.

Initially, the flame thrower was effectively a narrow cube and five cylinders stacked on top of each other - not something that looks like it would fit in the game and not really clear what it is.

After creating a basic texture in Inkscape to add some bolt / mounting points to the base plate, some inlets / vents to two of the cylinders and darkening some areas to try and portray some depth, it began to take shape a bit more and it at least resembled more of what it is supposed to be:

Given the camera angle of the game, this would probably have been more than enough detail, but adding a bump map / normal map makes some of the details stand out much more:

After [quite a lot] more work in Godot, the arm and disarm animations are done and it now chucks out a nice warm flame towards the player 🙂