Progress
Started today with doing some 3d modeling for my 2d little game. I wanted to see if I could drop in a spaceship model and give it the same 2d collision and have it work, and short to say; it -could- work, but would require a fair bit more work all already to get going. I got it rotating but it wouldn't fire or move correctly. Being outside of scope, I still had something else I could do; take a render of the 2d model and use that for the spaceship! It certainly is a lot sleeker than the rapid drawing I did.
I really do like doing 3d modeling, and I think if I had the time I would redo the basic walls, background, turrets, cores, keys and doors. Not improbable but I want to focus on finishing things off first. I did go ahead and make my own starfield to replace the desktop background I was using for space, and the result is also quite a bit cleaner and also tiles much better as well.
The background has a few very bright stars which should make finding the player position much easier, and in addition I added a rotating planet to the background that should be a nice big obvious landmark that'll be hard to miss if a player is trying to 'refind' the level within the generous boundaries. I was fortunate enough to remember too I had a planet texture I made back in 2008 perfect for the occasion; essentially just a mixture of blue and green cloud filters set up to layer and then tiled. I'm going to put a pin into making a handful of those for future reference.
For one last addition, I have now established scenes for and fully written out my cutscenes! I think the basic narrative I have will re-inforce the theme enough to give the project a sense of completion. Just having time to breath between levels alone already makes things much smoother. Word count for the plot comes out to 1600 words between 3 scenes, so just shy of the about 2000 I'd write if I was running a ttrpg session. The roughest part was figuring out precisely how wide I could get with each line and making sure to pre-write in a very forgiving way to the space, all for the sake of a starwars-esque title scrawl.
Final Goals
Since we're in the last week and nearing the end of the project, the last big thing to do here is to create the 3rd level. There are still plenty of tweaks and final additions I want, but everything is now optional. Sounds and effect for the players power, music for mission success, a full 20 bars of musical theme, a cinematic theme, a defeat theme, having a player hit-effect, a healing item just to reduce the difficulty, and setting the self-destruct timer to be more generous and appear on screen are all on the table. Additionally I'd love to be able to do all of the artwork in a 3d render style.
Just a few more days to go!