Everyone loves Instagram filters, right? Well why not have them on your video game?

Post-processing is the art of adding visual effects to your game to really add some atmosphere and identity to what you’re building.

Particles. Sweet, beautiful, generated particles.

We’re in space, so obviously we need some stars. We could do this by finding a repeatable transparent image of stars, but we already covered that in Unity Dev: Moving Backgrounds.

Having never used a particle system before, I did my research. Much of the…

I’ve been feeling like our game environment has been a bit stale lately, which is why I switched up the background in my last article. It worked for me for maybe a day but it was still missing something. That something was movement. Motion creates emotion, as they say. …

Previously we’ve set up animations for our Powerup objects, but they’re just a set of sprites animating in a never-ending loop. That’s obviously not going to work for everything we want to animate.

For example… let’s blow up some alien ships.

Thinking it Through

1. We want the alien ships to explode only when…

We’re going to take a short break from adding new features to our game to clean up some of the existing code. …

In yesterday’s article, we added some UI to direct the player to press the “Enter” key or the Start button on a gamepad to restart the game when they’ve died. Wait though… our Input Actions are tied to our Player object and when we die, we destroy it! …

I'm liking it quite a lot, James. The more I tinker with it, the more I see the potential behind it. I've got another article coming out tomorrow that refactors the original approach I took and facilitates a basic multi-Action Map approach.

These days, it’s up in the air whether players even want a user interface. A number of games include the option to completely hide the UI of games to increase immersion. …