Split mechanic and good ideas on paper…

Today I implemented the split mechanic…

I wanted something to beef up some boss fights, and I decided to implement a split mechanic: when some robots explode, they spawn two (or more) versions of himself, at half strength… Visually, it’s not done (it’s too sudden, needs some transition, like an explosion or teleport effect), but it works rather well as a mechanic:

While on the asteroid planet, I found a big problem that kind of spoils my whole “cracked ground effect”:

I forgot to test it… Basically the sphere decal I make affects whatever is on that area (in this case, the robot)… I was expecting it to look like lighting in that area, but since I have no light modulation on that, it becomes that what you see, which super-sucks… The screenshot is already of an experience in using a sphere for the lighting decal instead of the crack (which looked even worse)… Not sure if I can figure a way to do this better, to be honest… The actual effect I want would be something similar to point lighting in a deferred renderer, but this is not a deferred renderer, so I’m not sure on what I can do to fix that… As is, the decal just colors everything on top of it with the same color as it has, with only slight modulation if the light is shining, since the decal is drawn after the lighting of solid objects.

So, to make that look like lighting, I’d have to define a base plane, and fade out the illumination vertically, for example, but not sure if that will work at all…

Back to the drawing board, which is too bad, I liked the crack-effect…

Now listening to “Aeronautics” by “Masterplan”