12 FEB 2022:
- What you see above is the screen when the player dies: (still a work in progress)
- First off, it tells you how many enemies you destroyed. It only highlights the applicable rows.
- Below that, it shows your highest Threat Level, which just shows how hard the game was when you died. Think of the wanted system in the Grand Theft Auto games and you get the idea.
- Below that, the game always tells you exactly what killed you: A collision with a ship or a projectile. This has also come in very handy for debugging!
- Finally, the player can choose to play again or exit to the desktop.
- Having the music stop when the player died was causing the game to crash. So I experimented with having the volume decrease on player death and increase back to the previous user setting when they chose to play again.
- I'm working on different backgrounds. In the gif above I'm experimenting with a green nebula between the two star layers. Ultimately I'd like to have randomly generated nebulae, but so far it's been a little difficult to achieve. Once you start stacking layers they have a tendency to cancel each other out which makes it less visually appealing.
- Carriers are done! You may encounter a carrier that spawns on the left side of the screen, or the right.
- The game currently has 13 different enemy configurations and there is almost always more than one configuration active at any one time.
- Fixed a bug where the cruiser "beaks" would still open even after the cruiser had been stunned.
- Bombers no longer slow down when hit (but the hit does contribute to morale reduction).
I have two business trips that will take up the rest of February, so there may not be much in the way of updates until March, but I will keep posting weekly out of habit and to share my weekly motivational quote. Speaking of which:
Quote of the Week:
"Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm." -- Winston Churchill
Thanks for reading and have a great rest of your week!