Portals

As part of the final level the alien ship that appears will create portals to other star systems, mostly ones you've already visited and leave behind ships that the player must defeat. If all ships are defeated then the alien ship will move on to the next star system.

A lot of that is still work in progress, as for now the player has no reason to attack those ships instead of simply attacking the big alien ship.

The portal effect is made using 3 cameras

• One for the regular player view over the players ship. 
• One for the portal 'shadow', the area which the player should be able to see through
• One for the view through the portal on the other side.

The mask is a very simple render with no post processing or any other effects and only 2 objects to render, the long shadow cast and a center circle. This is then combined with the render texture from the other side of the portal in a shader used by a UI element. The shader simple uses the red channel of the mask to show where the other side of the portal should be showing. This does allow for some fading along the edges of the portal shadow. The portal shadow shape is driven by code and it itself uses vertex colours to indicate where the edge of the portal shadow is for the fading effect.

The Final Boss went through a few different designs until I landed on this. Most of the others were either a combination of cubes or hexagons, as I wanted to keep with the geometric theme. However the resutls were a bit underwhelming.  So I started thinking about more complex ideas like a kaleidoscope and went with a simple mirror effect combined with a relatively standard torus knot from Blender. The result is reasonably effective I think.

If there are any details you would like to get more details on, feel free to contact me.