23 JAN 2021:
As I mentioned in my last week's post, I had a major decision to make and this week I made that decision:
Starting fresh!
Surprisingly, I got quite a bit accomplished and I feel that things are moving in a very promising direction.
Here are the most important things I got done:
A NEW ASPECT RATIO
Scrapship will now use the 16:9 Aspect Ratio (instead of 1:1). The game will still take place in a square-shaped arena, but the far left and far right parts of the screen can now hold all my debugging variables, as seen in the partial screenshot above.
THREE SCREEN RESOLUTIONS
Instead of a screen sized 1000x1000, the options are:
1280 x 720
1920 x 1080
2560 x 1440
I think those three will be adequate for most players. Will one of those work on your computer? Please let me know in the comments!
BETTER SCALING
Most of my time was spent here. In previous demos of Scrapship, going fullscreen resulted in a very stretched and pixelated image. I've since learned a LOT about proper scaling techniques in video games. There is still a lot of testing I need to do here. I have code that will allow for automatic scaling, but it's very math-intensive (lots of sin and cos). If it bogs the game down too much, I'll have to look at other ways to achieve the same effect.
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My strategy this time around is to make sure the menus, screen resolutions, scaling, etc are all working as intended before putting in the actual gameplay. I like to think of this as the "canvas" for the game. You can have a great game, but if the screen the game is played on is not optimized, it's not going to look very good. By analogy, you could be a good painter like Da Vinci or Caravaggio, but if you suddenly have to paint the Mona Lisa on a canvas the size of a postage stamp it's probably not going to look as epic as you imagined.
One of the biggest things I've had to get used to this time around: Referring to screen positions as percentages instead of absolute values. If you place an object at coordinate 100, 800 and then resize the screen, things will look out of place. But if you make that coordinate a percentage relative to the screen size, then things fall into place where they're expected.
Thanks for reading!
Play the old version of Scrapship here.