Visual Enhancements

onpon4 on 2014/10/07 23:47 of onpon4
— edited on 2014/10/08 00:18

After moving and shooting was done, the obvious next step was... getting the AI to do something other than shooting constantly. But I held off on that and went with doing visual enhancements first, instead.

First came exhaust for when ships are thrusting. Each ship got its own exhaust sprite, and that was simply displayed in the same place as the ship (by creating objects for them). Piece of cake. There was one hiccup, but that turned out to just be me being dumb and making the exhaust objects "inactive", which in the SGE causes animations to not happen (among other things). Easy fix.

But it still looked kind of depressing, a simple black background with ships on it, so I decided to add on the most important graphical touch: the background. I had already planned to use a nebula effect. At first I was going to just paste together some nebula images into a background, but then I decided it would be a lot cooler if the nebula was randomly generated, so I did just that. I generated nebulae nearby and away to create a nice parallax scrolling effect (and was excited when I found out that this previously untested feature only had one very simple bug), but then I decided to also generate nebulae in the foreground as well. The screenshot doesn't do the result justice; it looks amazing in motion.

Edit: I don't know why parts of the nebula show up as purple and light green. In fact, these parts are blue and yellow-orange, respectively. This screenshot shows the correct colors:

Next up is the AI, which I assume will be the hardest part, so it's a good thing I still have quite a bit of time left. I might end up adding some powerups as well later on; we'll see.