As I move closer to the closed beta and work through my task list, I’m trying to make time to write some dev updates!
The most exciting thing that happened this week was a tweet, site and tumbler post by Alpha Beta Gamer. I got a lot of visits to the site and more signups to the closed beta. Nothing keeps me motivated like users wanting to check out the game!
Last night’s focus was improving the general ambiance of Sectors. I had a twitter conversation with indie aficianado Heiny Reimes recently and his main point of feedback was that space was visually boring. This was mainly because I hadn’t gotten to adding interesting art but it also made me put more thought into how to make Sectors distinct but also retain some elements of randomness. Space does change.
I created a Decor entity with some basic behaviors. I created a data model representing a decor object. I implemented the new data model into the Sector data model and started playing with game data to add decor elements into the Home Sector.
Another thing I did was experiment with aliased (hard-edged pixel art) vs anti-aliased. I originally intended for this game to have fairly high resolution but hard-edged pixels. But with the background art implemented, it looks way better to have nicely aliased, high-res art. This allows for blurry planets and stars that make space feel deeper.
Now that the majority of game features are in, I’m spending a lot of time tweaking art and content. The majority of my workload from here on out is really finishing the content creation. I need to define new weapons, ships and sectors that give the player a nice progression curve. I need to add some interesting art and more ships.
Unfortunately, I also have to do a lot of “boring” stuff like finish game menus, title screens, etc. I also have to do platform-specific stuff like game cursor and make sure it actually runs on non-dev machines!
Thanks for tuning in!
Commit 7f95b19
