A very productive bank holiday Monday. The first thing that will strike you about the image is the new terrain colours. Gone are the bright yellow sands and dark red splotches dotting the dunes. I’ve added a more subtle gradient now, and tweaked the turbulence of the terrain generation which gives much more interesting looking levels, which definitely seem a lot more realistic than before 🙂 I’ve also improved the harvester sprite, and added some highlights, and made the tracks seem more dirty. Or at least that was what I was going for 🙂
I’ve also addressed one of the issues I was most worried about – displaying the amount of money you had, as well as other stats. I’ve implemented a slide on system, that when you press certain keys, a menu item slides on from the bottom of the screen. There are two menus currently, the funds menu and a debug menu. The game now does have some playable aspect to it, rather than just randomly spawning in harvesters and scrolling around the world. The player starts with 1000 undetermined currency points. Spawning in a harvester costs 250 of these. For now, I’ve created a very simple ( and not final ) way of gaining funds. By clicking on a harvester, it stops harvesting and sells what is in its tank. This is then added to your funds.
The debug screen is nothing special at the moment, but its something I need for testing :
As you can see, its fairly straight forward: an FPS counter and the number of harvesters spawned in the world. I wanted to do this because I can imagine the game having a lot of harvesters and wanted to build something which would let me stress test the code. Though the harvesters are very simple at the moment ( they move randomly and just harvest when material is under them ) – it will allow me to judge the performance changes when I add more sophisticated code to them.
I was pretty impressed by that 🙂 but it bares little resemblance with the future as I doubt anyone will ever spawn that many harvesters 🙂 The harvesters are spawned with a single keypress all around the 2000×2000 world. Was pretty happy with the framerate there, especially as no optimizations have been done.
Still a very large to-do list, but pretty happy with the way things are going so far 🙂
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