Week 4, Natural Disaster: Tsunami

With a game concept like Datepocalypse, where a big pile of chaos should serve as one of the main flavors of the game, some of the hardships comes in the form natural disasters and this week I’ve been working on one that we call the Tsunami. As other games may give the player a screen sweeper, to clear all enemies from the play area, this game has this “enemy” which basically does the same thing but at the same time might be dangerous for the player as well. Plus, the player have no control over it’s activation.

As mentioned the tsunami functions as a type of enemy and is created and spawned in a similar way as other obstacles through the wave manager but has some key differences. It has a huge rectangular hit box that covers the entire game area from left to right and a height of about the same as a player avatar. This because if the player gets hit by the tsunami it will get past the player without continuously doing damage to the avatar for the entire tsunami duration but only on first impact. This could of course be done with a smaller height but for now with the tsunami’s current speed this felt like a simple solution to avoid the player avatar being missed and not affected at all. However, the player can protect both his avatars from taking damage by connecting the them thus activating the player shield. The actual sprite for the wave is however about the size of two game screens. As the wave is so huge and would completely cover the avatars we made it slightly transparent so that the player wouldn’t lose track of their positions.
A really big wave should affect every object it touches in some way, that’s why it also kills / pushes all still active normal enemies off the screen as well, which makes it similar to a screen sweeper. The enemies won’t actually try to avoid being hit but this is a necessity for the player which might not be so easy since the wave moves much faster than other obstacles. That’s why we added a second animation for the tsunami consisted of big, red, flashing warning triangles in the top of the screen to signal the incoming of something big and dangerous which played a few seconds before the actual wave would enter. We figured the triangles wouldn’t be enough so we also added a loud warning sound similar to the one used in real warnings for tsunamis, earthquakes or war to amplify that it might be a good idea to prepare the player shield.

There are still some bugs with the tsunami such as the collision between itself and the player where sometimes it would get stuck on the avatars pressing them continuously downwards and in the end hold them pressed against the bottom of the screen but this could be fixed by moving either the avatar past the wave hit box on impact or temporarily deactivate either of the collision bodies (preferably the avatar’s bodies to avoid enemies slipping through the wave as well).