Hi again everyone,
The last week has been a big one but mostly for the work involved rather than the changes that got made.
So, this week worth of work was centred around two main changes, one was a sort of visual pass on the game to make it look a bit more exciting and the other big change was the addition of what I'm calling the 'Fileroom'.
Visual Upgrades
So, I realised after some play that the game just looked a little flat during gameplay. So I decided to add a few visual elements and layers to give that extra juice that I think makes the game pop a little bit more.
So, below you can see the previous look of the game without the visual upgrades:
So, the stuff that I've changed kind of summed up:
Added a new parallax background nebula layer for additional colour
Added a new parallax background layer with asteroids and space junk that increases in frequency near planets
Altered the boost speed effects
All HUD elements got a slight alteration to give them a bit of visual interest
The different weapons, celestial bodies, bullets, exhaust etc etc has been given bloom
Overall, I'm really happy with the changes as I feel that it gives the whole game a bit more visual depth!
The Fileroom
This one is a little bit more on the boring side truthfully but it was a lot of work and I'm really happy with the result. Essentially its a sort of in-game codex for things as you unlock them or come across them so you can sort of keep track of things you have and haven't seen, what they do etc. Here it is is, not a super interesting screenshot but I think its a big quality of life boost.
And thats it for this week, there were a few minor bug fixes, but those are the main changes. The last thing that took up a huge amount of time (because its really not what I'm good at) was re-doing the main trailer for the game to replace the existing for the new visual upgrade.
In terms of whats next, as with basically everything I add to the game I think theres a new engineering event in this new visual system somewhere....