Wednesday 2 December 2015

New Menus and UI

Old news, but here are some screenshots:


A Year of Progress

So... not a huge amount of progress since I stopped posting on the blog last October! From what I can recall, I re-did the UI, got new buttons and fonts, fixed a bunch of bugs and worked on all the 45 levels, which are all playable. I still need to go through them all again and sort by difficulty level, and get them play-tested by someone.

In the process of building the levels, I added quite a few functionalities to the game. For instance there are now four types of characters which you can transport from planet to planet - Astronaut, Alien, Robot and TimeBomb. They also fight each other. Astronaut beats Robot, Robot beats Alien, and Alien eats Astronaut. The TimeBomb explodes planets 10 seconds after being dropped.

I've also created an audio engine on top of OpenAL and added some placeholder sound effects, like the rocket engine, star and power-ups and explosions, and I've had the help of my co-worker Darren, who so far has created two soundtracks, one for the menu, and one for in game. The in-game music is split in tracks, so I can flip the volume levels on each track depending on the situation, like when an Astronaut is aboard the rocket, the music becomes more exciting.

Besides audio, I also added Game Center support, all highscore tables are working and there's UI for that too.

Camera movement is so much better now too, it never shows space outside the game area, the rocket is usually in the centre of the screen, but if he approaches the edge of "space", the camera stops moving.

I'm now going through the graphics assets and either polishing, colouring or re-working them from scratch. My plan also envolves creating a bunch of background images and a few nebula and stars semi-transparent overl ays.

Here's the before and after of Asteroids:


These screenshots also show a timed level and the three blue character heads, indicating what the goal of this level is.

* Oh, right... I realise now that I hadn't even shown the old asteroids yet.