Summary:
In which "space" has stars; the view of the "Bubble Moon" from "space" is changed; moons may rotate; the look and feel of the "Ossuary Moon" is being reworked; moon-surfaces may optionally have reduced exit-radii; the "Vertical Slice" moon now has halls of "flow" and "traps"; a race is being made; spike-traps become more efficient; bumping into things now produces sounds; and breakables are provided.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows something that should hopefully make "space" more "space-y": Stars!
(Of course, when your stars are set on the inner the surface of a great crystal sphere, things might become a little odd as you fly about said sphere...)
And with an inset showing a change to the look of the sun, too.
The week just past was a varied one, with quite a few changes and changes of a variety of types, I feel!
As shown above, the "space" between moons (and planet) now at last has stars!
(If you saw my posting to this effect on Twitter, let me note that the number of stars has been increased since then, as has their performance.)
What's more, the positions of these stars are loaded from a file. As a result, their placements needn't be random: specific structures or patterns can be depicted, if desired. See for example the patterned stars of the "DLC Proof of Concept" solar-system:
On a similar note, in the week just past I reworked the depiction of the "Bubble Moon" as seen from "space": it now shows highlights on the bubbles (as when seen from the moon's surface), giving them a bit more form.
Now, the texture applied there to the "Bubble Moon" is simply that: a static texture. This means that, despite the movement of the sun, the highlights on the bubbles will remain fixed, causing them to be generally inaccurate.
So, in the week just past I implemented support for moons in space to rotate.
Specifically, there are essentially three types of rotation that a moon may now have: No rotation, as before; simple rotation at a given speed, in a given direction; and rotation to face the local sun.
The "Bubble Moon" then uses the last of those: it rotates itself towards the sun, thus allowing the highlights on its bubbles to remain accurate, even though static.
Further, the "Whirlpool Moon" found in the "DLC Proof of Concept" now rotates around, reflecting its behaviour when visited.
Remaining with visual changes, I've begun reworking the look and feel of the Ossuary Moon. In short, I've become dissatisfied with the very flat look that it has had, finding that I wanted something of higher quality.
However, this change is very much a work-in-progress (so many bones... o_o; ), and I'm not yet ready to show it!
I mentioned in last week's blog-post, I believe, that I had begun work on a "Vertical Slice Moon"--that location saw work in the week just past. Perhaps most saliently, I began work in earnest on two of its levels: The "Hall of Flow" and the "Hall of Traps".
The "Hall of Flow" is intended to showcase the "currents" that I believe that I showed previously, as well as to show some additional range of gameplay via a race.
The hall itself has been at least sketched out, I believe, complete with some currents at its entry.
The race I've started in on, but is yet a work-in-progress.
Conversely, the "Hall of Traps" is intended to showcase, well, traps! Specifically, it currently holds a few rooms of spike-traps and sliding-traps:
And speaking of those spike-traps, in the week just past I improved their efficiency, I believe: where before each spike was an individual game-object, now a single "spike trap" object may hold multiple spikes. This significantly lowers the performance impact of multiple spikes, allowing me to fairly-comfortably have such rooms-full of traps as shown above!
In working on the "Vertical Slice Moon", however, I found myself faced with a problem:
Moons have a fixed size, which may be somewhat large when lower levels call for it. But if the "surface" level has only a little content--just an entry-hall in the case of the "Vertical Slice Moon"--it can be quite tedious to traverse the largely-empty "surface" in order to reach that little.
So, in the week just past I instated a solution to this, I hope: Simply put, the "surface" levels of moons may now optionally have a smaller "exit"-radius than their visual radius.
On entry, the player is placed just within this radius, and passing beyond it causes the player to launch into space--in other words, it acts as though it were the "edge" of the moon. Said radius is then depicted by a simple dashed line.
On the audio side, in the week just past I implemented support for sounds to be played when the player bumps into the environment.
Moving over to gameplay, in the week just past I implemented a new feature: breakables!
In short, these are, well, things that the player can destroy. In some cases, they may then drop items.
And aside from all of the above, there were a number of other tweaks, changes, and fixes enacted in the week just past that don't seem worth detailing here!
That then is all for this week--stay well, and thank you for reading! ^_^
