Now let’s talk about the second game we made. This idea started from the weirdest place possible. One day we were playing with some particle systems from the Unity asset store and we found a very cool explosion system. We decided to build the game just because that explosion looked amazing and we had to use it.

Game origin

And that’s how S.T.A.R.S. was born. The name comes from Special Tactical Assault Recon Squad (or something like that). We wanted to try something in space, trying to keep it simple we decided to make it a spaceship battle game, something similar to the old X-Wing or StarFox 64 Star Wolf’s planets.

Before we talk about the game let’s take a look at what was the graphic style we came up with for the game.

The game style was based on the idea of having weirdly looking spaceships, amazing galaxy skybox, laser battles similar to Zone of the Enders and beautiful background planets. Here’s the result:

The lines on the edges of the ship’s wings look like came out of Tron and the sunlight coming from behind the planet (not really from behind but it was a cool effect) give the player the feeling that he is really in the vastness of space.

Most important features

There are a lot of things we learned from this game. But let’s see a list of the features we were able to finalize:

• Spawn enemies randomly in space
• The Tron-like look of the spaceship
• Tracking lasers system
• Radar system in space (this was really cool)

I’m probably missing some elements that were created for this game but those ones are the most important ones I can think of right now. Since this game doesn’t have gravity (since we are in space), it was a completely different challenge from what we did in Honor & Glory.

The radar

When we created the minimap for honor and glory it was challenging but not as much as this one. This one was in space so, how are we going to position the elements in a full 3d environment and make sense?

Imagine a horizontal plane at the ship’s level all the way to the horizon. And then tiny lines that go up to each individual enemy point; that’s what we came up with when thinking of a solution for the positioning of rhe enemies in the radar. I think it was intuitive and made total sense.

I’m pretty sure the coder for the radar would like to write a post in detail of how this worked technically speaking so I’m not gonna go deeper in detail on this topic. But let me know if you would like to know more.

Did we learn something?

Of course!

There’s no project where you don’t learn something. Working on the skybox, player (spaceship) movement system, radar, battle systems, states, everything was amazing experience. I would say that the rigidbody manipulation for this game was particularly interesting to code and think about.

The game wasn’t completed (again) because of life events. I actually don’t remember exactly why we didn’t finish this one, so I will assume that it was because we were too lazy and lost our motivation in the project. But it was a really cool project so it would be a nice project to take back again.