Alright so I spent some time working on sprites and such, and figured I should make a bunny themed space ship for this, so knocked together a very crap looking sprite, which is... this!
Now, I don't really like how it looks, those big black borders are ugly as sin to me and I really wanna work on the shading, but I was having trouble visualising it. I got access to a tablet though so decided to sketch out some of this idea into several views and knocked htis up in about 10 minutes or so in Krita.
Dunno if it's easy to see but I was trying to work out where the wings fit and the guns (which thinking about it I'mma have them be railguns. which fire carrots. because carrots are cute. and contain iron. or ... something... i dunno maybe they do , these ones do. idc. iron carrots. magnetically accellerated carrot shots whatevs :D
I like the idea that the "ears" are actually missile pods (maybe manouvreing thrusters too on the backs I have to draw those in maybe). That "gem" on the head is the cockpit where the pilot actually sits
Speaking of carrots:
Now see, I feel much better about that sprite (it's expanded a bit so it's easier to see things, it's like, a third that size really). But yeah the player ship fires those! Healthy!
Someone liked the idea of star-splosions and I like the idea of fluffy marshmallows so here's a sprite of the star splosion piece!
You'll note there's only one. I was looking at the sprite code in GML and I found out I could not only set the colour of it through image_alpha but I could pick a random range of colours, or a specific colour, tried it out, and got some neat results, and managed to hack together some code where it picks a random colour from a set of pregenerated HSV values stored in variables (probably a much more efficient and tidier way of doing it but this seems nice and simple and logical to me), then fades out after it's thrown in a random generation. I can generate a few of these from a destroyed entity and fling them out and have them fade out and slow down hopefully somehow, to make cute little explosions without resorting to fire and noncutethings. I first tried this with greyscale stars but they just didn't look good . :( but with this light blue it makes really quite nice pastelly shades!
Finally, here's some clouds, because a background should have clouds, and this first stage at least is on a planet.
These are actually four separate cloud images in one sprite strip, since I wanted some nice randomised scrolling to the background, and looking at the sprite code I can pick a particular frame of an "animation" and leave it on that one. the idea is to have it pick a sprite frame at random for each instance of the cloud that's spawned, lock on that one, and fling the cloud down the screen at a random horizontal position. It's kinda late today but I'll see what I can knock together tomorrow after work.
Might have a working prototype at least! Having done some experimentation with GML before christmas I feel like I can work this out fairly quickly :)