22 MAY 2021:
New this week on Scrapship:
- Fighter debris. Debris floats off the enemy fighters after a segment has been sufficiently damaged.
- New mini-explosion animations! In previous versions, I used a particle explosion effect. Looked cool, but very math-intensive in the background. I spent some time the last two days using BlastFX to make some explosion effects (as shown above). It's "good enough" for now, but I might try and improve how it looks at a later date.
- More thoughts about scrap. I tried an experiment where scrap could bounce off of other objects. It looked a little interesting, but I decided against it for a couple reasons:
- It makes the screen look ridiculously busy. The player should be focused more on their ship and the enemy ships and projectiles and that's hard to do when one's eye is constantly being distracted by scrap flying around.
- Collision-detection with the floating scrap was not very good. Sometimes it would bounce off of objects properly and sometimes it would get stuck. Overall it looked very messy. I could always try and perfect the physics and hit-detection, but my goal this year is to actually finish this game, not get nitpicky over minor features that might not even make it into the final version of the game.
Quote of the Week:
"You cannot improve something that you don't understand."
Thanks for reading and have a good rest of your week!