Since the last update, I mainly focused on some cosmetic features and bug fixes, though I did lay the groundwork for more important features later.
First of all, I’ve continued work on the jump system. As I mentioned in my earlier Dev Log 5 post, this works by having every player ship disappear (in practice, they get scaled down to 0 and get removed from any enemies’ targeting, then get scaled back up after the jump). Now, the jump actually does something – it spawns a lens flare as a visual effect to cover up the ship disappearing, and it triggers a game manager method to change the level environment. For now, all that method does is change the skybox, but in the future it will despawn enemies and environmental objects and spawn in new ones, accompanied by an encounter text box.
I also added some particle effects to represent things like explosions and weapon impacts – notably, ships produce blue sparks for shield impacts and orange sparks for hull impacts, and explode in a big ball of blue particles when destroyed. Torpedoes also leave behind a trail, making them easier to spot. These effects are incredibly basic, but it’s helping the game feel a little better. I know I’m getting away from minimum viable product status with this, but it’s fun to work on, and I don’t think it distracts too heavily. I originally considered using fancier effects, but decided against it because I thought they’d be too distracting and be more trouble to implement than they were worth. Plus, I want to continue my trend of making as much of this game as I can by myself as a learning exercise.
As you can also see in the above pictures, I’ve started adding buttons to the UI. Right now, only the bottom three actually work. The top three will get functionality later, when I start implementing the pause menu (for saving and exiting the game), the navigation menu (for traveling to a new star system) and the resources menu (for managing the resources of the fleet’s various ships).
I think the next priorities on my list are going to be the resource system and a system for loading in new encounters with new enemies (which will likely require some work on the enemy commander AI system). I can think of many features I can add to the game’s fleet controls and combat systems (e.g. adding friendly torpedoes, adding click-and-drag selection, adding a waypoint system, etc.), but I think I should prioritize making progress towards a minimum viable product with a full core gameplay loop.
Evan Parry 