Journal 150 — Unity Project Development, 2.5D Shooter

Chris Nielsen
3 min readFeb 22, 2022

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Objective: To add final boss different movement patterns and update UI Text

In the previous article, I updated some of the player movements to show tilt and speed thrusters. In this article, I will add two more waypoint patterns on the final boss for when it takes damage. I will also experiment with the UI text and change the style.

UI Text Updates

Originally, I was using the legacy UI Text game objects, but I decided to experiment with Text Mesh Pro game objects.

In the UI Manager script, I had to add the TMPro namespace and change the Text variables to TextMeshProUGUI.

Here are the updated results.

Final Boss Attack Patterns

I copied the previously created waypoints and gave them new names and colors. I also gave them new tags so that I can find them and assign them through the Game Manager.

Here’s the basic script for drawing waypoints.

In the Game Manager, I made two new properties to get and set the new waypoints. For reference, here is the original assigned waypoints.

And here are the added waypoints.

Now, in the Final Boss script, I updated the OnTriggerEnter function to assign the new sets of waypoints. I experimented with this a few ways and found a counter to count one event to change the waypoints caused no errors.

For the two functions to switch waypoints, I wanted to accomplish a few things:

  • Assign a speed up factor and shoot faster to the movement and update method
  • Clear the existing waypoints
  • Reset the wayPointIndex to 0 (first position)
  • Reset the waypointsFinder in the GameManager
  • Assign the new waypoints
  • Move the game object to the new set of waypoints

Now, let’s see the results.

I can investigate a smooth transition to the next set of waypoints, but the behavior works!

Thank you for your time!

I have a few more planned updates:

  • Add another player weapon
  • Add a checkpoint save after the mid-level boss
  • Modify the power ups so they drop randomly
  • Add some brief animations at the start and at the mid-level and final boss stages

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Chris Nielsen

An Engineering Manager consultant who is seeking additional skills using Unity 3D for game and application development.