Beta 0.1.2 Changelog

Hey guys. It's that time of the month again! Or maybe week? It's been eight days since the last post. Which is usually the second quickest time between updates. Anyway, let's get into the changes.

Changes

• Remade the pause menu.
• Implemented the radar. 
• Increased the max FPS cap from 120 to 300.
• Created a new pause sound.

Pause Screen

So I implemented the new pause screen I was talking about, and rather successfully too! I'm rather proud of the myself for managing to make it nearly identical to the mockup outside of some differences. I also made the black bars slide in as well using linear interpolation. Not gonna lie, the effect look so good, I kept pausing and unpausing the game just to see it. Y'all have to see it for yourselves, because the 16 FPS gif is not doing it justice.

Overall, I like how I did it. It really gives to the opportunity to display extra information to the player. I also went ahead to whip up a new pause sound, since I'm not really a fan of the old one.

Radar

Implementing the Radar to the game was quite challenging. Getting the chunk position of an entity was easy. The hard part was translating said chunk position to the correct spot on the radar. After some trying, I managed to come up with a formula that solves the problem.

Now I know this looks bad, but if you actually know math, it ain't that complicated. To run it down this formula involves multiplying a vector, and subtracting the product by another vector. We'll go through this step by step.

The Radar's icons are drawn on a 129x129 canvas that separate from the actual sprite itself. Think of it as an extra layer. The g is represented by the gap between the top left of the canvas, and bottom right of the first icon slot. In this case, it's 24.

cx and cy is actually easy to figure out as it's a vector for the chunk position, and the second vector represents what size the icon is going to be which is 15. So to unpack, the formula is actually this.

cx * g - sw = rx

cy * g - sh = ry

I pretty sure I just scared off most of the people reading this. If anyone is reading this anyway. This seems to be the only solution I could find, but if you have any better ideas, please let me know. Or I could just be met with radio silence again...

Well, the radar works exactly how I wanted it to be. It updates every second or so to show the chunk positions of the player and entities that are tied to objectives. It really streamlines the game's progression.

What's Next?

Well, I've crossed most things of my list for what to do. My Trello "todo" list is like very small than it was before. Like there's only seven items. What I'm going to do is to review my game design document and decide what to do from there. I'm really in that "drawing board" phase of development.

I'll see you guys later