Once again, I’m in game developer hell. Short on time all week, and struggling with the artwork. With two fighters done, I got started on the first gunship. Gunships are slower than fighters, but can take more damage and have more powerfull weapons. As usual, I started the design with some sketches on paper. While watching tv. Over the past few months, I seem to have developed the ability to watch tv and draw at the same time. After watching Grounded For Life, That 70’s Show and Dharma & Greg (in that order), I had some sketches that looked quite fine. So I fired up Inkscape and started drawing, but for some reason they looked quite stupid on the screen! Okay, so all those sketches were useless. Starting all over again, and it wasn’t until this morning that I finally came up with something usefull. Here’s what it looks like:

The central sphere, with the cannon, rotates to aim at the player, while the engine pods stay horizontal. This is only the sprite, it doesn’t do anything yet. They will always operate in pairs, and fire bolts of blue plasma at the player.
Another word on the problem of generating paths for the enemies to follow. I think it sucks bigtime that the path object included in Torque doesn’t work. You can’t seem to get smooth movement with a curved path. I hope this problem will be solved in one of the next versions. For the fighters, I have already come up with a very good solution, in the form of plotting a path with trigonometric functions. I have found a function that does a pretty good job at generating random looking paths (gonna explain how I did it in one of my following posts) and the result looks impressive. For the gunships, I’m gonna try something else I’ve been testing. These enemies actively try to evade the player instead of following a preset path.