Weapons were the primary focus for Masteroid in December. I added new behaviors for weapons such as scatter shot, varied scale and varied offsets. I overhauled all weapon sprites and particles, created a ton of new weapons and rebalanced a ton of things. It also used to be that AI would never be given a weapon with an energy consumption in excess of the ship’s per-turret energy generation. That meant that AI tended to have slightly weaker weapons but be able to sustain a constant fire rate indefinitely. Its much more interesting in combat to have an enemy with more powerful weapons that they can’t shoot forever – it presents exploitable opportunities to the player.
I’ve also poured a ton of work into major UI redesign. This will not actually make it into the game until likely the January release but great progress still happened in this dev cycle!
Here are the new features in the December release:
- All ships enjoy a 40% improvement to turn rate – this makes them more nimble and responsive!
- All new weapon sprites
- All new weapon particles
- New sounds for new weapon types
- New Scattershot weapon behavior
- New Gatling weapon behavior
- New Ion weapon behavior
- 20 new weapons total
- Camera shake on nearby ship destruction
- Camera shake on nearby asteroid destruction
- Save data now only stores IDs instead of full weapon data. This means future balancing and updates will not invalidate older saved games
- Refactored spawning code to accommodate a core engine change that improves spawn performance
- Refactored a variety of math utilities to improve AI and other code readability
- Built some tools to help balance the game when creating new weapons and ships
- Worked on UI redesign and planning for next release
- Fixed major bug where some pathfinding calculations return Infinity and crash the game 😛
- Various minor bugfixes
The next release focuses on major improvements to UI.
Thanks for playing,
Justin
