Well, technically I suppose this week’s post should be titled week 11 (as I missed the last two weeks) but I’m just going to keep them numbered sequentially anyways. Over the last couple of weeks I did a good amount of work on tracking player statistics, gameplay balancing, bug fixing, and some really cool visual polish.
I’m now keeping track of a number of (pretty basic) statistics throughout gameplay. I’m tracking the amount of damage a player does and receives (broken down into several types), the number of kills/assists/deaths, the number of crates they deliver (and prevent from being delivered!), and how far they traveled in game (probably not working correctly still). This all gets displayed in the end of game UI, and used to calculate the credit reward they receive at the end.
I also ended up doing a bit more gameplay balancing and tweaking. After taking into account all the mass that was being added by turrets and passive systems, my ships were lacking in acceleration power across the board and especially in the smaller classes. I rebalanced the mass of loadout components to reduce masses of components commonly installed on smaller class ships, and increased the top speeds of smaller class ships. I boosted the engine thrust of ships across the board to improve acceleration and also increased ship strafing efficiency, which determines how much of a ship’s engine thrust can be applied perpendicular to the ship’s direction of motion. Overall, ships feel a bit more responsive to fly now across the board, although the smaller classes benefited the most.
Now for some visual polish gifs! Last week I had a lot of fun rebuilding the systems I was using to do turret firing/hit effects. I had some super basic stuff there as a placeholder until the weapons were a bit more fleshed out, but after the last round of balancing I was so into doing stuff with the turrets that I just kept going. Here’s a look at an Overload with a couple of Energy Lances, one with the new effects turned off:
Here’s a bunch of firing effects for some kinetic turrets:
And some kinetic turret hit effects:
And a full broadside I posted on my twitter:
Full broadside or Forward cannons? Positioning is important! #screenshotsaturday #screenshot #indiedev #indiegames #unity3d #gamedev pic.twitter.com/rhySQiqpQo
— Cloudy Water Games (@CloudyWaterG) July 21, 2018
In creating those effects, I rewrote my basic “Explosion” class, and subclassed a “BulletHit” as a type of Explosion. This also caused me to go back and redo some work on some of my old explosion VFX, leading to a better looking explosion:
And if you combine them just right, and put them over a ship (and add a few more elements)…
That looks pretty good! All right, I’ll be back next week with some redesigns to my play menu UI, undoubtedly more bugs smashed, and maybe some more cool GIFS.