I'm back in Ohio! And back to full-time development. Yay.
New drone model
Somebody on the stream pointed out that the drone had three legs, while its body had five sides. This was a holdover from the original model I made for grepr back in 2014.
Fear not, the error has been rectified!
New title screen / logo
GDEX is coming up, and they emailed me asking for assets to put on their website. I realized I needed to figure out the logo and come up with a reasonable title screen to attract people at the expo.
Here was my first quick attempt:
Serviceable, but boring. I also wasn't happy with the composition. I looked at a bunch of main menus in video games and realized that a lot of them put the menu items right in the center of the screen. This frees up the frame to allow for a more interesting composition:
I had to mess with the scan lines and tone them down a bit to reduce flickering. I tried using just a regular texture sampler to create the effect, but that actually flickered even more than my math-based solution.
One thing I'm still not sure about is the way the scan lines interact with the UI. The scan lines are modulated by depth, and the UI renderer doesn't write to the depth buffer at all, which means that you can see faint geometric outlines in the UI. This was completely accidental, and I kind of like it because it's almost like transparency, but I'm not sure if I should keep it or not. It would be a relatively easy fix.
Here's the background without the menu in the way:
Control points and energy indicator
Last night I was thinking that the levels needed more interactive objects or "goals" in them. There were only the health pickups, which also passively give you energy. I also didn't like the hard cap on energy collection; since you can only own up to three health pickups, you can only earn energy so quickly. I was also worried about a new use case I wanted to support, which is the possibility of more than 2 teams. Each team needs its own spawn point.
I solved all of these problems by allowing players to capture each other's spawn points (or "bases"). There are two reasons why you might capture a base: 1) to earn more energy, and 2) to gain another location from which you can buy upgrades.
Each map now has 3 or 4 bases on it. If there are only two teams playing, the other bases start out neutral.
Here I am capturing a base. It's a non-cancelable operation. I also added a timer indicator in the lower left to show when your passive energy gets applied every 15 seconds.
