Hello friends, fans and family!
It’s been a couple of weeks since my last update so I thought I would share with you what I’ve been doing since. Vacation is officially over which means I’m back to my usual routine of working on the game on early mornings. I’ve made a small adjustment though since I no longer have to commute. I now wake up a 06:00 instead of 05:00 which is better for keeping my sanity :P.
What other changes have I made? Read on…
UI updates
I’ve removed most of the text I had on the UI and made separate panels for the unit, skill and tile sections as well as changing the side that the tile details were displayed on. This way, everything that gets updated frequently is moved to the left side so you don’t have to keep attention on both parts of the screen. I’ve also started messing around with very minimal borders to give the panels a bit more “pop”. The UI is definitely not ready but it’s been much improved. Here’s a screenshot:
Graphical updates & attack frames for the characters
The graphics will be replaced and improved quite frequently since I’m still not 100% satisfied with the looks of the game. The tiles need a lot of sprucing up and I will most likely update the colors a bit since something is a bit off… Haven’t yet figured out what it is though XD. There have been some big improvements made on the characters at least! I’ve started changing the shading to be on the left side instead of right and be more consistent with where the light is coming from. Made the mistake of changing the shading of the enemies too which was not necessary since they are flipped in the opposite direction XD. The biggest change however is that I’ve added some expressions and attack frames to the characters that makes everything a lot better! Previously all the animations were just bump to attack but now you can clearly see the units preparing for an attack and then 1 frame for performing the action. Why just 1 frame? Well, let’s just say that animation is BY FAR what takes the most time out of everything that I’m doing so I’m doing the bare minimum necessary for it not to look like crap :D. If I have time I might add more frames but the are more pressing issues, like making a game for example ;). Anyway, here’s a zoomed in screenshot of what the attacks look like in action:
Updated Unity to an LTS version
Unity is widely known for being a bit… finicky when you update between versions. I’ve read a lot of horror stories about people having to rework stuff because something broke etc so I’ve been holding on to the exact same version for quite some time know. I’ve been waiting for Unity to release what they call an LTS version (Long term support) that are versions that you can safely work with without things constantly breaking or being updated. The LTS versions that were available where old though and since I know my project will go on for at least another year I wanted to have a 2019 or 2020 version before I tooked the plunge and updated. This week I gathered my courage and updated and it went… perfect actually! I had to make a small fix in preferences so that Visual Studio (where I write code) and Unity would cooperate but it wasn’t hard to fix so now I’m cruising on an LTS version and life is good :P.
Other fixes
Here’s a small list of other fixes and improvements:
- Removed cursor that was only intended for play with a gamepad
- Started working on a tutorial
- Registered a domain name for the game’s website. Stay tuned…
- Restructured my millions of to-do lists to something that makes more sense
Thanks for following the project! See you again in about 2-3 weeks 🙂
// Luis
Sinister Siamese Studios 