Summary:
In which the Ossuary Moon gains skirting; the appearance of the Vertical Slice Moon is further developed; multiple visual elements are polished; new map-icons are added; game-selection is implemented; the main menu gains some text; credits and legal notices are compiled and made available; and the race is tweaked.
Greetings and salutations!
This week's screenshot shows a tweak to the appearance of the Ossuary Moon: the bases of walls and pillars now end in a rather less rectilinear fashion!
The week just past was, in some ways, a "polish" week: A week primarily of the implementation of ancillary functionality, of tweaks to appearances, and of various improvements of one sort or another:
As shown above, the Ossuary Moon now has walls and pillars that don't end in simple straight lines. This is achieved simply by the addition of a strip of "skirting", using a new texture made in the week just past.
And indeed, I think that it improves the feel of the environment!
Likewise, I continued in the week just past with the look and feel of the Vertical Slice Moon. Specifically, the walls there too now have skirting, and the pillars have been reworked:
Furthermore, in the week just past I worked to polish various elements of the visuals: tweaking certain effects, improving the rendering of map- and inventory- icons, touching up the automatic outlining, and improving the handling of player-trails when crossing room-boundaries.
I also added a few map-icons that were yet missing--specifically, icons for health-upgrades, ship-skins, and the one remaining boss that I intend for the vertical slice.
On the UI side, perhaps the most salient change is the addition of a new menu:
When the player presses the "Start a New Game" button, in general this simply takes them into
Moons in Crystal itself, naturally.
However, the game is designed (hopefully) to support DLC adventures--which prompts the question of how to allow the player to start one such, should they have it.
Hence this new menu: When only one adventure is present, the game starts as described above: clicking on the "Start a New Game" button just starts whatever is available (presumably the main game). However, when more than one is present, the new menu is shown first, giving the player the choice of which to begin.
Also shown in the screenshot above is a minor change made in the week just past: The addition of a byline, engine-credit, and version-number at the bottom of the main menu.
And one more new menu was added, this one rather simpler: There is now a "credits/legal" screen, which shows a basic scrollable text-view. That view holds a text compiled in the week just past, including my own copyright claims and disclaimers, as well as the various credits and license -texts/-references called for by the various third-party elements that I use (e.g. music).
(The button for this "credits/legal" screen can also be seen in the screenshot above, by the way.)
In compiling the text for the above, I discovered that a few of the pieces of music that I was using had licenses that were perhaps problematic. (Some may have been okay, but I preferred to play it safe.) So, in the week just past I spent some time replacing those few.
On the gameplay side, I mentioned in last week's blog post, I believe, that I had a few touch-ups in mind for the race. And in the week just past I did indeed implement some changes: in short, the race now ends only when all racers have crossed the finish-line, and the starting trigger has been moved and reduced (thus allowing the player to pass without starting the race).
And, well, there were quite a lot of tweaks, fixes, and changes 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! ^_^
