27 AUG 2022:
Quite a bit of progress this week!
The cruisers now attack from 3 directions -- from the top, left and right.
The latest post on my Instagram is a video showing how that looks.
Next up -- the Battleship. I've never been completely satisfied with the Battleship design, for a couple of reasons:
- It looks too much like a battleship and not a spaceship.
- Having 3 guns is cool, but trying to deconflict them as they rotate is a nightmare.
- The engines on the battleship look disproportionate.
After lots of tests and experiments, I finally came up with a solution!
I chopped off the back end of the battleship and added the engines from the carrier. Not that I'm really going for realism, but it does make sense that if one were creating space battleships and carriers that they would probably use the same engine style for their capital ships. Below you can see a preview of the newly redesigned battleship:
This new design solves all of the problems I listed above. So now comes the tedious part . . . chopping up the battleship into unique segments and programming the logic for the 2 guns so they track the player properly. When this is done, the battleship can come at the player from 4 different directions (45 degrees, 135, 225 and 315).
I also found a more efficient way to render my graphics. Previously, I was using color depth 16 at 100% compression, but have now found out that color depth 8 at 100% compression looks identical (as far as I can tell). The main upside of this is that graphics rendered at color depth 8 makes the render many times smaller in file size. This will come in handy as I'm aiming for an initial game load time of less than 10 seconds.
QUOTE OF THE WEEK:
"The ticket to victory often comes down to bringing your very best when you feel your worst." -- David Goggins
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!