Alien Growth

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I thought I would show off something on the forums for a change.

As part of my game project, I wanted to make some sort of alien growth, similar to what you see in Natural Selection 2, and the Aliens movie.

While this is not a very efficient method of making the growth, it does convey the idea.

The growth basically just sends out a bunch of line traces in random directions, creates a new growth at that location and a decal, nothing too fancy happening here.
Each growth can only grow 2 more growth objects to avoid crazy, over the top, exponential growth.

After 10 seconds, the growth stops all other growth objects from spawning any more growth objects, then after about 1-2 seconds, picks a new growth object (at the moment, it is furthest distance, which presents some issues) to start growing more growth objects again.

This probably took me about 2 days to do. Most of the time I spent just fiddling around with decals, trying to make them work when being projected onto emissive materials, which eventually I just gave up on trying to do, and made it so the growth pops the lights out, disabling the emissive, and avoiding the problem.

Anyway, enjoy
https://youtube.com/watch?v=vKfG7F4UZkQ

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Thats pretty cool. I think i like the light popping better than what you had in mind. You could imagine watching a large growth pursue the player popping all the lights along the way making like the dark is chasing them haha.

Well done, keep pushing forward!

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Thank you :slight_smile:

I think that for a proof of concept, it does the job.
I think to improve on this really rough version would be to have displacement on the decals so they bulge in the center, but for now, it’s not really a big deal. I have a bunch of other stuff to work on to try and polish up a prototype of my game to submit for an unreal dev grant but there’s so much in my game that I keep getting side-tracked and distracted…which I guess is not a bad thing, as it also keeps things fresh and enjoyable to work on :slight_smile: