On my Student Team Project, I am in charge of all things Game Feel. This week I put a lot of focus on the Flame companion. In our project, you have a tiny flame friend that you need to protect from the rain. This means the flame essentially needs to have some sort of damage system as well as a "death." Firstly, I needed to decide how the flame would actually take damage. It's a small being, so it should theoretically take a lot of damage from any water. I decided to have the flame take damage over time rather than all at once to allow it to slowly shrink like a real flame.
The flame has 5 states: Full health, slightly less health, low health, nearly dead, and dead. This allows it to shrink, adjust its glow, and look sad. You might be saying, "Look sad? What does that even mean?" I'll explain that shortly. The flame spirit has a point light on it to adjust its glow. Because this project has to be in Unity 2019.1.5 I don't have access to the new 2D lighting system, so I have to be creative with using a point light to get my desired effect. Each state has a point light intensity and position in the Z associated with it. The current effect isn't working exactly as I would like, so I am planning on also adjusting the Range in the future. The lighting is a finicky aspect to work with, so there is a change I will change it to a sprite and simply adjust the sprite according to the states.
Each state also has a size associated with it for the flame to adjust to. I wanted to really make it clear that the flame spirit was dying, and a flame shrinks over time so each state shrinks the flame more and more. The sad eyes are a cute addition of the flame. When the flame is at low health it appears sad. I added two circles that set active at this state to make the little flame looks sad. I plan on making it even sadder for the other states, but currently, even just the addition of the sad eyes has a strong reaction on passersby.
