Lightwave

"Lightwave", short for "Grandpa Lightwave Drives Through Oncoming Cyberpunk Traffic" started out as a small in-class project that grew into a personal side project that I continued working on after the end of the class. We were only able to get a basic control scheme and art style down in the short amount of time we had, but I managed to at least make it playable afterwards.

The original idea was to create a fast paced game that focused on speed and music. I also wanted the game to somehow react to the music I chose to put in, so I imported some of the code from my music visualization project and used it to animate the texture on the walls, making them glow with the intensity of the average volume of the currently playing song.

In its current state, the game is a simple endless runner where you roll left and right using the movement of your mouse and propell yourself upward in whatever direction you're facing using your bottom thrusters. The goal is to make it as far as you can without running into any of the oncoming traffic.

I quickly learned that Unity does not like when things go fast, and that the collision physics start to become more and more unpredictable the faster you go. This forced me to learn and implement a classic technique for achieving the illusion of speed, animating the texture on the wall backward instead of moving the ship forward.