Dot pattern
I had a bug in my AI, so I turned on my nav mesh debug renderer to see what was going on.
Sure enough, there was a bug where faces were not rasterized if they were almost horizontal but not quite. You can see a conspicuous gap in the screenshot above.
After fixing the bug, I thought the nav mesh looked cool enough to stay enabled in release mode. I cleaned it up by adding transparency and antialiasing:
Finally, I wrote a shader to make the dots fade out over distance:
Promo art
Last week I tried to use in-engine screenshots to create high-res promotional artwork. I realized that wasn't going to work, so I set about making Blender imitate my rendering style:
Of course Blender is so amazing that it was pretty easy. Freestyle edge rendering let me choose which edges to highlight, and a halo material worked for the stars.
I imported a few more models from the game, threw in a quick particle system, arranged them into a scene, and slapped the logo on it:
The colors seemed a little garish, so I tried another color scheme:
Everyone on Twitter liked the pink version better, but I really wanted to get rid of the black background behind the logo. I also enabled contour rendering to get a nice silhouette around the main character. Unfortunately, this also added a silhouette around each individual spark particle, which made them too distracting. I ended up putting the sparks on a separate render layer with no freestyle edge rendering, and then compositing the two layers together. Here's my final composite setup including an extremely simple bloom effect:
After a few more hours of posing and tweaking colors, I ended up with this:
Hopefully this will make for a nice banner at IndyPopCon.
Combat tweaks
As usual, I'm making tons of small but significant tweaks. Gameplay has changed a lot in response to a decent amount of playtesting recently. Weapons no longer take energy to fire; only building things incurs an energy cost. Energy also accrues more slowly, and upgrades cost more.
Here's 30 seconds of footage showing what the game is like now: