November was an exciting development month. As mentioned in the v0.4 release notes, this month focused on improving my development tooling. My existing tools for creating new sectors, ships and weapons were pretty crude. Finalizing content for release was very manual and time consuming, which means I haven’t created as much new content for players to enjoy!
As part of developing the tools, I also improved the art used in sectors. Past iterations have taught me a lot about techniques, both artistic and programmatic, to make sectors more visually appealing. I went back to Photoshop and created some new sprites to add texture and depth to level design. This turned out even better than I expected and I plan to continue to add new variants that make sectors exciting and unique.
While a lot of the actual development in this release is more useful for me than for gamers, it will have the benefit of greatly accelerating the speed at which I can develop new content for the game!
Here are the bullet points for November:
- Creation of new sector and ship editing tools
- Artistic overhaul of the existing five sectors
- Creation of new Fire Nebula sector
- Tweaks and balances to existing 10 ships
- Creation of 5 new ships!
- Fixed bugs with only first line item scrolling in scroll boxes
- Fixed several bugs with UI, sprites and other visuals
- Camera can now zoom in more than twice as far
- Decreased boost cooldowns, ships can now boost more frequently (spacebar boosts)
- Slightly decreased boost amount to balance reduced cooldowns
- Game now builds against engine source to take advantage of improvements and bugfixes on a faster timeline!
The next release will continue to improve content, specifically weapons. I also am planning some major UI improvements and want to expand the mission system. Given that December is a major holiday month, not all of those things will get addressed but I’m excited to get started!
Happy playing,
Justin
