FEBRUARY UPDATE

• March 05, 2017
• mathilde
• DEVELOPMENT
• 2 Comments

DEBUG, POLISH:
I corrected the weapons and the gameplay code, as well as a huge amount of small bugs. There was something wrong in the resource management which could cause a lot of problems in the futur between different games sharing their assets in the wrong way (if the assets share the same name). Now, everything is separate and it’s neater.
I also did a lot of small corrections and modifications to the UI until it felt “right” to me. A lot of things no one will remark, but which make the user experience smoother.

LAYER PRIORITY:
I worked for a long time on the priority and display order of the sprites and objects: users can use layers to control the rendering order, and I force the bullets and items order: the enemy bullets are always on top, then the player bullets, then the items. Same thing for the explosions, which should never hide the bullet during gameplay.

PARALLAX:
Speaking of layers, I wrote a small tool which allow to add parallax between layers. It was not trivial, because everything in the SHMUP Creator is 3D. The idea is to move away in depth the layers moving slower and to scale them to keep their apparent screen size. It was not easy to do, but it works :)

SNAP 3D:
I’m currently working on the snap 3D: I was proud of my sprite snapping, but I discovered that it was sometimes not working well. Instead of correcting it, I decided to write a new snap working in 2D as well as in 3D. It’s working well now. Still some polish in the next few days and it will be complete.

AND AFTER THAT ?
Next I will work on some in-game tutorials: it will not be full Nintendo-style tutorials, because I don’t have the manpower nor budget to do this in this version of the tool, but at least it will provide some basic explanations and an UI tour. I don’t want the new user to be completely lost at the beginning.After that, there will be on-line tutorials to help and teach people how to use the different features, which we need to write (crap…).
The 3D snap and the in-game tuts are the last two big features.

It’s not the end of the road, but my big to-do list is almost empty !!

Share this post: on Twitter on Facebook on Google+