Tuesday 18 June 2013

Background & scrolling improvement

So I've made a small number of additions to the game since the last dev video. Namely in the visuals department, I'm not saying i've finally gotten around to the enormous project of mass producing sprite art or anything. It would be immensely cool if I had, but alas that is not the case.

Features Added:
-Component Highlighting
-Scrolling
-Background placeholder
-Background Depth

Bug Fix:
-Weird Lag bug which occurred about 1-2 minutes into game play then dissipated.

I decided it might be a good idea to implement component highlighting... It will um... Well it's like umm... It looks really cool. I don't really have a practical reason at the moment for adding component highlighting. Though in the event I end up overlapping components or something similar I guess this will help you immensely by showing you what your mouse is highlighting this what you are clicking.

On top of that I've been working on some background and scrolling code, so the game finally acts a bit more like it should. Previously the camera was fixed, you couldn't scroll around the page or extend your starbase past the edge of the map. So now with scrolling enabled the Starbase can grow significantly larger.

Also with the scrolling code I decided I might add some visual, because somehow staring at a blank starless background sorta was making the little green design troll at the back of my mind throw a hissy fit (Don't you hate it when they do that?). Well either way, there are now basic stars! And what's more these stars also have depth, I took it one step further and decided to layer the background early on to create the illusion of 3D depth. This is really only visible when scrolling, this video shows:


Oh and did I mention that there is now a main hub/bridge for Starbases now? Hub has 8 hard points in which you can extend corridors off. Eventually down the track the main hub will produce base amounts of food, water, oxygen and electricity. 

No comments:

Post a Comment