October was a slower month in terms of dev progress. I had a lot of company and we started a remodel project in our home that has occupied a few of the weekends and evenings that would have been spent doing gamedev. I also worked on art quite a bit, which doesn’t lend itself to long, satisfying bullet point lists!
Masteroid v0.4 kicked off a focus on more differentiation between sectors. Stations in Masteroid have been pretty boring. All sectors shared the same station design. I want sectors to have a distinct feel. Some sectors will be busy commerce hubs: lots of ships docking and undocking at big, city-like stations. Other sectors might focus on mining with lots of ships mining asteroids and unloading at stations that look like refineries. Still other stations might be focused on defense with larger ships and stations that look more like fortresses.
That effort started in this release with the creation of a variety of tiles that can be put together using Tiled in unique configurations. Each sector now has unique stations that vary in size and somewhat reflect their purpose. This is a work in progress that will continue to evolve in future releases.
Here are the bullet points for the October release!
- Implementation of Tiled-based stations
- Created some 50 tiles for now. This will continue to expand as the building blocks for new stations.
- Worked on some new ship art, this is not in the game yet!
- Created 5 unique stations
- Created a Pause menu in game
- Replaced “Exit to Menu” button with a Pause button
- Created icon for Pause button and Warp button
- Revised Pause and Warp button placement and style to use new icons
- Created randomized sector that displays behind menus
- Randomized sector moves around subtly in reaction to game cursor
- Made several gamepad controls updates. Bound more logical buttons to UI and actions
- Created a Masteroid game trailer
- Started exploring the work required to make Masteroid work on Xbox One (this is not a promise or announcement)
I hope you all love the new stations. In the next release I’m focusing a lot on my content tools. I want to be able to create new sectors, weapons, ships and stations more easily so I can really expand the amount of things to explore, fight, upgrade, etc! I’ve already started working on the tools to do this.
Get this release now and enjoy future updates on Itch.io!
Happy playing,
Justin
