If you are here for the advanced homing missile coding secrets, stay tuned for my next article where I focus on the targeting, distance measuring and homing behavior. My objective for this article, is to create art for a homing projectile and it’s powerup counterpart, and then to get those objects working in my Unity game.
I already have a basic tusk projectile for the player, so I just color changed the same asset to make a homing missile version of the narwhal tusk.
I want it to have a light beacon that repeatedly flashes from the nose of it, so I made a sprite animation to enhance the projectile look a little bit. This is just using a circle shape outline with another circle shape with a gradient/ transparent fill, with a soft edge.
Now for the powerup. I use the letter H inside some circles with a few lines to finish the look. A gradient fill here, some glow there and I’m all done! It’s pretty simple, but I hope it’s a recognizable homing powerup set between some sights, even though it doesn't explicitly say “homing missile”.
Alright! It’s time to open Unity and import these exported PNGs as Sprites. I start by dragging the first sprite frame of the homing light animation into the scene view. I create a new animation, give it a title, hit record and then drag all of the animation sprites into the timeline. The spacing is all consistent other than the last almost transparent frame that hangs longer to give more time before the animation loop begins again.
Here is the homing light acting as a beacon for the projectile.
