We’re back! And still alive! Well, kinda. We ran into an interesting problem that gave very, uhm, interesting results. I’ll show some of the bloopers later on.
Sadly, this also means that our prototype isn’t half as complete as we would’ve liked. We have some very basic stuff going on, like moving, shooting, and enemies spawning and stalking you, but that’s about it. On the bright side - this problem we have been working on has been very close to getting solved completely. As it basically defines the core mechanic, this also means that once it’s done, we have a very solid base to start doing the real work from.

Destructible tiles

As mentioned in the last log, we want our planet to consist out of tiles, which can break when damaged too much. On top of that, we want to be able to place biomes over these tiles, so we need a position and rotation to match tile and biome perfectly.
At first, we simpy imported a file that had all the tiles as separate objects, click and drag, boom, planet with tiles, done.
Not so fast. That wasn’t quite what we needed. This way, while you do have access to all tiles, you cannot bind any data to them. Would some form of tileManager work? Getting all the tiles isn’t too difficult, but then what? How do you properly bind data to these objects without running into trouble with references to deleted object and all of those bugs? On top of that, having a quick and easy way of accessing the tranform of each tile is also absent. Yes, you can use math, but depending on the shape of the tile, you could still mess up the rotation.
The other option was to generate the planet. More math! After a lot of research, we ended up with many… interesting shapes.
Enter the bloopers.

Beautiful stars, but not quite what we needed.
After fixing some small errors in the mathemathical stuff behind the generation of those stars, we eventually ended up with this:
Much better, yet it still had (and has) some issues. For example, the rotation sometimes messes up, and after some more reading and playing around with online models of “subdivided icosahedrons”, we realized that, although an icosahdron has same-sized faces, a subdivided one does not.
That’s where the custom sphere will come in, and hopefully solve the last few issues. This is for next week, though. Sorry for the cliffhanger.

Sketches and Bibles

Our artists have been hard at work at their Art Bible, and the first sketches and concepts have popped up. With it, discussions about style, color and effects have been held in our discord server, ending in a good idea of how everything is supposed to look: a colorful, low poly world, with toon shading and outlines. Some examples that make use of most of these properties: Some sketches for player and enemy character design have also been posted. This one is made by María Martinez:

Up next

Of course, the first thing the programmers want to do is get the planet generation to work as it should. Once that is done, they can go back to adding features like actual waves of enemies, with stats that increase with each wave, and drops that help you out.
As for the artists, they will keep working on concepts and sketches, while experimenting with toon shading, outlining, and different proportions for the characters and biomes.