Originally I was going to show these off piecemeal, but fuck it. I want to catch you guys up on most of the stuff I’ve been working on, so this is going to be a big one. I’m gonna stick it under a dropdown so it doesn’t take up as much room.
The goods
First off, in addition to the building info menu, there’s now an entirely new build menu! No more tapping through the different buildings to get to what you want to build, everything you have unlocked is right there, in organized tabs. Additionally upgrading buildings directly is no longer a thing, Mk. 1, Mk. 2, etc. buildings are now built separately.
This includes a whole new category of thing to build which is another major change from the first game: platforms. No longer will you be constrained to the ground! Collision is still a little janky but this isn’t a platformer so making that perfect isn’t a priority at the moment.
There is a new resource, metal, which will be part of the construction of everything. Don’t worry though, you get it waaaaay faster than crystals.
Speaking of crystals, there is now a downside to reactors in that they cost crystals to keep running. For how powerful they are though I think it’s a fair cost.
Oh, and turrets look way different now. A couple buildings do actually but this one was a bit more complicated than the others so I’m showing it off.
Other things that I don’t want to make separate screenshots for:
- With the new menus and everything, this game is going to be a lot more mouse/control heavy. No more one hand controls for everything, sorry.
- I added shading and new idle anims to the sprites, heavily inspired by the wonderful work that @Flateur did for the HD pack in the first game. Still not quite done with them, but they’re nearly there. (plus making the upscaled ones for pilot’s new size)
- There’s going to be a drone that follows you around and you can use to fire lasers at enemies. No more random auto-lasers from the player. Right now it’s just a circle that bobs up and down, which doesn’t look that impressive in a screenshot so I left it out.
- I’ve added some new building types, but haven’t fully implemented them or figured out how hard they’re going to be to implement, so no spoilers on those yet to avoid getting people’s hopes up and then saying they won’t make it in.
- There’s some new sounds for the player for walking around on the platforms and sliding and such.
- Oh yeah, there’s sliding “animations” now (just one frame repeated so it doesn’t really count as an animation, but they’ve got 8 frames for future versatility).
- Added some more fine-tuned sliders for noises in the menus.
- Fixed the graphics settings I had from the first game (I think? The resolution was being messed up by a general project setting hidden in a sub-menu I didn’t know about, I think I got that one but I don’t have another monitor to actually test it on, so that’ll have to wait until a public build. Still looks like ass a lower resolutions though due to how low res it starts out as anyway).
- The pause menu has duel keyboard/mouse controls, not going to extend that to the gameplay menus because I want the player to still be able to do stuff while looking at those.
- Textboxes are working and drawn a little differently (each character individually instead of a progressively longer string), which makes it possible to do text effects, but I don’t want to implement those without a way to make it not a pain in the ass for every line (the simple way would be added something that says “do x effect on characters #-#” but that sounds like hell to do for a lot of dialogue so I would want to do something more like regular markup with <> and </> tags, but that’s much more complicated).
The things I want to finish up before releasing a demo type thing are pretty much just spritework at the moment, but I’ll probably be doing some backend stuff at the same time as well.