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RTS Unit Death Animations: Deterrence - Video Devlog 16

The sixteenth weekly devlog of Deterrence. This week I go over how I made unit death animations and more with Unity and other tools.

Matthew Gianfrancesco, Blogger

July 5, 2022

1 Min Read
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A tower defense mixed with real-time strategy where you repel attacking sentient AI robots until they give up.

Additional Unit Behavior

Units needed a way to automatically attack their attackers if idle and alert nearby friendly units if they're idle also. I'm referring to the same behavior as in Starcraft 2; those units would run towards their attacker automatically. This would make management easier for the player and the units would behave as if they had a brain. Although there may be scenarios where the player may not want this behavior, so, in the future I plan to make a hold position command.

Tweaks and Polish

  • Unit fire animations no longer use lights and the muzzle flash graphics were enlarged.

  • All units garrisoned in a building now have the same origin for detected enemies in range.

  • Changed the texture color of the engineer to make the unit more distinguishable to the player.

  • Chinook rotor blades now have motion blur.

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Unit Deaths

To complete the units, I added a way to instantiate game objects that would represent their death. Each death object was given a transform from some part of the unit instantiating it. Doing it this way would allow me to make many different ways a unit could die to accommodate all types from mechanical to biological units. For soldiers, they would instantiate an object that would play a death animation and instantiate a weapon that would use physics gravity.

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For robots, they instantiate body parts that use physics and instantiate an explosion that gives the body parts an explosive force.

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